Wind River Helps Bosch Motorsport Race for the Win
OutdoorHub 12.11.13
Wind River, a world leader in embedded software for intelligent connected systems, has announced that Bosch Motorsport, part of the Bosch Group, one of the world’s largest suppliers of automotive components, is using VxWorks for its engine control units (ECUs) for endurance motorsport race cars. During the 2013 season, the Bosch Motorsport ECUs powered the winning team at the “6 Hours of Silverstone” race in April, “6 Hours of Spa” race in May, and the “24 Hours of Le Mans,” the crown jewel event of the FIA World Endurance Championship (WEC) in June.
Engine control units play an essential role in race cars, often with features enabling telematics, data logging and wireless connectivity. Reliable, hard real-time performance for ECUs is a mission-critical requirement; without it, racers risk the dangerous outcomes from a failing or out-of-control engine. Telemetry is also vital to a winning race strategy as it enables teams to interpret massive amounts of data during competitions to help racers reach peak performance. A precursor to the Internet of Things, race telemetry requires significant machine-to-machine connectivity and intelligence. VxWorks allows telematics-enabled components to manage tasks for data acquisition and communication, and ensure that race engineers properly receive the vast amounts of performance data in real time.
“The speed and complexity of racing demand powerful and highly deterministic automotive devices. For deterministic, real-time performance, VxWorks Bosch Motorsport uses VxWorks. By doing so, Bosch Motorsport creates components that allow race engineers to be competitive and achieve optimum vehicle performance,” said Markus Kirschner, group leader for hardware development at Bosch Motorsport. “Wind River provided highly effective and reliable technology, support, and services throughout the entire project. Wind River helped us develop an advanced, high quality product while meeting challenging deadlines. In fact, we were able to shorten development time by over 50 percent for our engine control units.”
Bosch Motorsport, a division of Bosch Engineering Group and a world leading automotive supplier, develops and manufactures systems and components for use in motorsports. To meet all of Bosch Motorsport’s requirements, Wind River provided a comprehensive offering including a fully integrated VxWorks platform with the middleware, tools, board support package availability, training, and technical support and services. By delivering a complete offering, Wind River minimized Bosch Motorsport’s need to hunt for additional resources, helping to keep the project moving quickly. Given the intricacies of race cars, Wind River worked closely with Bosch Motorsport during the complex integration process and provided extensive training.
“In the world of racing, fractions of a second can make a difference. VxWorks delivers the highest levels of deterministic performance. Wind River has been excelling at M2M and IoT technologies, like cutting-edge real-time telemetry, even before there was a name for it,” said Georg Doll, general manager of automotive solutions at Wind River. “Wind River helps Bosch Motorsport and its customers achieve maximum levels of vehicle performance. Having a worldwide industry leader like Bosch Motorsport trust in our technologies further reinforces Wind River’s decades of automotive experience.”
The Wind River automotive portfolio also includes Wind River Platform for Infotainment, Wind River Connectivity Solution Accelerator for iOS device connectivity, Android expertise, Tizen integration services, tools such as Wind River Diab Compiler, and virtualization and hypervisor technologies. Wind River world-class professional services and global support help customers better manage the highly detailed requirements, complex software integration, and intricate project planning associated with the automotive industry. With decades of embedded software and automotive industry experience, its unique mix of expertise allows Wind River to support the auto industry in virtually any project.
For additional details about Wind River automotive solutions, visit http://www.windriver.com/solutions/automotive/.
