Case Study: Volkswagen achieves flexible, driverless valet parking integration with RTI Connext DDS

Solving the Research Collaboration Challenge in Driverless Valet Parking

Volkswagen partnered with researchers at ETH Zurich, the universities of Braunschweig, Oxford and Parma, and Bosch on the V-Charge project to develop driverless valet parking controlled by a mobile phone app. The challenge was integrating many heterogeneous computers, sensors, and drive-control systems across Ethernet and CANbus while allowing each collaborator to keep using their preferred tools and systems. RTI Connext DDS was selected as the integration framework to support this distributed research effort.

RTI enabled the team to decouple applications from the underlying communication infrastructure, so modules could be moved between networked computers without changing IP settings or reworking the network. Its QoS features also helped ensure timing and delivery requirements were visible and met across the system. As a result, Volkswagen and its partners could develop and update components independently, reduce integration effort, and focus more on research and application development instead of communication and topology management.

Volkswagen

Wojciech Derendarz

Project Manager for V-Charge