Because today's software-intensive automotive systems are still developed in silos by each car manufacturer or OEM in-house, long-term challenges in the industry are yet unresolved. Establishing a standard for car-to-cloud scenarios significantly improves comprehensive domain-related development activities and opens the market to external applications, service provider, and the use of open source software wherever possible without compromising security. Connectivity, OTA maintenance, automated driving, electric mobility, and related approaches increasingly demand technical innovations applicable across automotive players.
The open and secure Eclipse Kuksa project will contain a cloud platform that interconnects a wide range of vehicles to the cloud via in-car and internet connections. This platform will be supported by an integrated open source software development environment including technologies to cope especially with software challenges for vehicles designed in the IoT, Cloud, and digital era.
This ecosystem will provide a comprehensive environment across various frameworks and technologies for (a) the in-vehicle platform, (b) the cloud platform, and (c) an app development IDE - that is, the complete tooling stack for the connected vehicle domain (see Figure 1 below). Essential to this environment will be the capabilities for collecting, storing, and analysing vehicle data in the cloud as well as the transmission of diverse information such as cloud calculation results (e.g. improved routing), software maintenance updates or even complete new applications. While many IoT solutions exist in the Eclipse IoT ecosystem, Eclipse Kuksa combines the necessary existing technologies and fills the gaps for the specific requirements of the connected embedded real-time nature of the automotive domain.