Tier IV joins Linaro 96Boards Steering Committee background image

Tier IV joins Linaro 96Boards Steering Committee

Tier IV joins Linaro 96Boards Steering Committee

[Cambridge, UK; 20 March 2018] Linaro Ltd, the open source collaborative engineering organization developing software for the Arm® ecosystem, announced today that Japan-based intelligent vehicle technology company Tier IV, Inc. has joined the 96Boards initiative as a Steering Committee member. Tier IV owns Autoware, ROS-based open source software, enabling self-driving mobility to be deployed in open city areas. This new collaboration provides Tier IV with standardized hardware on which it can extend its Autoware based offerings to support multiple SoC platforms. The 96Boards Steering Committee provides a neutral forum in which Tier IV can cooperate with other 96Boards partners to accelerate the development of the 96Boards specifications and new products based on Autoware.

96Boards is Linaro’s initiative to build a single worldwide software and hardware community across low-cost development boards based on Arm technology. A large range of products compliant with the 96Boards specifications are already available worldwide and this range is supplemented with additional hardware functionality provided through standardized mezzanine boards. Linaro plans to work with Tier IV and other companies in the automotive industry on building and optimizing Autoware on Arm. 96Boards will help define the standardized hardware platforms on which to maintain and grow the Autoware code base and extend support for it across a broader range of SoC solutions with consistent support.

“Autoware is the world’s first complete stack of open-source software for fully autonomous driving. It is not just a software platform, but a core system for the ecosystem of autonomous driving technology. The development of Autoware has already made a significant contribution to the practice of emerging autonomous vehicles all over the world. We are proud of Autoware being used by so many, and a very wide variety of, companies, universities, and research institutes. We are happy to support as many computers, sensors, and vehicles as possible.” said Shinpei Kato, Associate Professor at The University of Tokyo and the Founder and CTO of Tier IV. “The current version of Autoware is mostly used for R&D purposes. With Linaro’s participation, we are now aiming Autoware to be more production- and service-oriented. In particular, we will enable Autoware support on 96Boards, which now supports a full range of the major Arm platforms. The collaboration of Autoware and 96Boards will be the next core of the complete production-quality platform for all Arm SoC vendors, solution providers, and individual developers in the autonomous driving market.”

The 96Boards steering committee now includes more than twenty companies who are working together on Consumer, Enterprise, TV Platform, Networking, IoT and SOM specifications. To date, the Consumer, Enterprise and TV Platform and IoT specifications have been released with boards available for each. In addition there are a large number of mezzanine products and other accessories available for a range of applications from industrial control and robotics, through AI, HPC and IoT, on to data centers and edge applications.

“96Boards products are used in many application spaces as development platforms. There are opportunities for 96Boards in many aspects of automotive development, including pre-production, IVI, ADAS, AD and VCU,” said Yang Zhang, Director of 96Boards. “Tier IV and the Autoware open source platform is one of the most widely used ADAS/AD solutions today. As part of the 96Boards Steering Committee, we will be collaborating on the accelerated adoption of a choice of Arm-based solutions in the automotive space.”

About Tier IV

Tier IV is an academic startup company that provides products and services for intelligent  vehicles. Currently more than a hundred companies all over the world are adopting Tier IV’s solutions built on top of Autoware to develop autonomous vehicles and/or their components. Through the provision of flexible solutions built on top of Autoware, Tier IV contributes significantly to open innovations of autonomous driving technologies. http://www.tier4.jp/en/

About Linaro

Linaro is leading collaboration on open source development in the Arm ecosystem. The company has over 300 engineers working on consolidating and optimizing open source software for the Arm architecture, including developer tools, the Linux kernel, Arm power management, and other software infrastructure. Linaro is distribution neutral: it wants to provide the best software foundations to everyone by working upstream, and to reduce non-differentiating and costly low level fragmentation. The effectiveness of the Linaro approach has been demonstrated by Linaro’s growing membership, and by Linaro consistently being listed as one of the top five company contributors, worldwide, to Linux kernels since 3.10.

To ensure commercial quality software, Linaro’s work includes comprehensive test and validation on member hardware platforms. The full scope of Linaro engineering work is open to all online. To find out more, please visit https://www.linaro.org and https://www.96Boards.org.

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