Foundational Software Solutions for Robotic Systems

Optimize performance for robots in assembly lines, welding processes, and material handling using hard real-time operating systems. It helps reduce jitter and latency issues in robotic movements, which could mitigate issues around misalignment of components and more.

Safety-certified hard real-time systems enhance a robot’s response to a surgeon’s movement. Any delay in response could result in imprecise movements or incisions, which could impact patient outcomes.

Robot functions for order picking, packaging, sorting, and inventory management are complex and any disruptions could impact the efficient movement of goods. In this environment, the more responsive the robot the faster orders can be processed and handled, leading to reduced delivery times and lower operational costs.

Autonomous drones play a pivotal role in reconnaissance, surveillance, and even tactical operations. In this arena, deviations as a result of jitter and latency can have an impact on robotic responses (e.g., irregular movements, inaccurate targeting, etc.).

The QNX OS for Safety and QNX Hypervisor for Safety are certified to IEC 61508 SIL 3. QNX® Hypervisor for Safety offers the same trusted functionality and performance as QNX® Neutrino® real-time operating system (RTOS) plus virtualization support. These products are safety-certified variants of the QNX Neutrino RTOS and the QNX Hypervisor, respectively.

Building a safety-certified robotic system with a pre-certified RTOS allows you to focus on the higher-level components of the system, greatly reducing the certification process of the end-system. More benefits of a safety-certified RTOS, such as the QNX OS for Safety, include:

• Reduced development effort. QNX documents safety recommendations and restrictions to reduce the time and effort (e.g., testing, analysis, documentation) needed for you to develop these materials from scratch—not to mention enabling you to design a safe system using these guidelines.
• Reusable code. Build a platform and reuse it across your entire product line with little integration effort.
• Accelerated time-to-market. The development process can be streamlined to leverage QNX safety artifacts for quicker approvals from regulatory bodies.
• Maintenance and support. QNX products are maintained and supported throughout the product lifecycle with the utmost rigor, allowing you to focus your efforts on your applications and not the software it’s built on top.
• Cost savings. The cost of purchasing safety certification documents can be reduced as it relates to documentation development time and testing efforts. This cost is amplified if there are product updates that require resubmission of documentation.

Updates to ISO 10218 parts 1 and 2 standards for industrial robots are anticipated to be released with new functional safety requirements. These changes could standardize the industry’s safe integration for collaborative applications between robots and human workers. Added safety features are anticipated to be more software-defined and could require conformance up to IEC 61508 SIL 3.

QNX foundation software solutions are POSIX-compliant and will be familiar to anyone who’s worked with the Linux® operating system. Purpose built for sophisticated embedded devices like robotic systems, the QNX® Software Development Platform (SDP) 8.0 includes the latest QNX OS 8.0, QNX® Tool Suite (including QNX® Momentics® IDE our Eclipse-based integrated development environment, QNX® Toolkit for Visual Studio Code, and command line tools) and the QNX Software Center to provide a full-featured, microkernel RTOS for ARM and x86 platforms with 64-bit support. It also includes a High-Performance Networking stack to support basic-to-complex networking requirements.

Robot Operating System (ROS) and ROS 2 have been ported to and are available on QNX foundational software solutions. This allows you to take full advantage of the benefits of our products while using ROS and ROS 2 to handle the communication between robotic components such as vision systems, speech recognition modules, and actuator controls.

To accelerate the development of ML and AI applications for the intelligent edge, popular AI frameworks such as TensorFlow, TensorFlow Lite, and PyTorch are available with QNX products. The combination of these AI and ML frameworks on the QNX real-time operating systems enables you to build advanced features, such as digital twins for manufacturing sites that enable real-time processing on both the devices and in the cloud.

Through our vast network of ecosystem partners, QNX offers a variety of solutions to support the robotics and industrial automation sector. This includes support for CANOpen, Time Sensitive Networking (TSN), Profinet, EtherCAT, Data Distribution Service (DDS), Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT), Modbus, and OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA). For more details, contact us today.

For more than 40 years, QNX’s relentless dedication to technology advancements and real-world applications has been empowering the capabilities of the robotics industry. Our presence can be found in the following examples:

• Autonomous mobile robots (e.g., surface vehicles, underwater and aerial drones, warehouses, etc.)
• Automated guided vehicles
• Delta, articulated, SCARA, and cartesian robot manipulators for collaborative and industrial applications
• Surgical robots
• Autonomous robotic cleaners