Company
Description: Robert Bosch Engineering and Business
Solutions Ltd (RBEI) is a 100pc owned subsidiary of Robert Bosch GmbH, one of
the world’s leading global supplier of technology and services, offering
end-to-end Engineering, IT and Business Solutions. With over 10,000+
associates, RBEI is the largest software development centre of Bosch, outside
Germany. It has a global footprint with presence in US, Europe and the Asia
Pacific region.
It has seven state-of-the-art facilities spread across
Bangalore and Coimbatore in India and Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. The company
provides solutions for businesses in primarily three areas: Engineering
Services, IT services and Business services. Its focal industries are the
Automotive industry, Industrial Technology, and Consumer Goods and Building
Technology.
Very briefly, in a layman’s
language, can you describe what you mean by open source In-Vehicle Infotainment
applications and the ‘closed’ automotive domain? You can also give us a few
simple examples to illustrate your point. Worldwide, what is the current
position when it comes to in-vehicle infotainment technology?
In product development, ‘Open Source’ means
any component or part whose design or blueprint is freely accessible
universally. The design is provided so that anyone can make subsequent
improvements and redistribute the improved design. When we refer to software,
the design or blueprint means the source code and optionally its documentation.
‘Closed’
automotive domain refers to a product development model where the design or
blueprint is closely guarded as secret and made available only to insiders.
Close guarding is done to prevent competitors from learning from the design.
Closed systems may also result from isolated development where a design or
blueprint is very specific to a company and is not of use, or of interest to
another firm.
To
illustrate through an example, how an electronic control unit computes the time
and quantity of fuel to be injected maybe an industry advantage and maybe kept
as ‘Closed’ in commercial interest of the company. On the contrary, a
web-browser that is used in head unit maybe very similar to that used in a
smart phone and there may not be any commercial advantage in designing a
browser specific to head units and keeping it a secret. It is much more
commercially viable if the head unit used the same browser as a smart phone.
Coming to the current position in in-vehicle infotainment technology, most
systems use open source software components for standard and
non-differentiating functionalities of the system. For example operating
system, web-browser, media player, communication protocols that are standard
etc. Closed source, or non-open-source or proprietary source code is employed
wherever differentiators can lead to business advantage. Use of such open
source components also speed up the time to market.
You have mentioned that General
Motors and Bosch have joined forces to develop a new basis for automotive
infotainment system. For how long has this been going on and I presume the end
result is the Cadillac User Experience (CUE), the world’s first driver
information system to work with an open-source operating technology. Can you
tell us bit more about CUE?
We get involved from concept stage itself.
It takes about 18 to 24 months for a matured product to roll out. The actual
product launch that is integrated in the car takes about 2.5 years. The key
features of the Cadillac User Experience are:
Apple-like
touch-HMI
Natural language
speech recognition
Full 3D-navigation
graphics
Bluetooth-Audio,
Rear View Camera
Application
favourites
XM Realtime
services
MyMedia (Media
device content merging)
What are the current levels of
adoption of open source in the auto industry and what benefits does it serve?
Has this taken off in India by any means?
Current adoption of open source in the
automotive industry is limited to infotainment units, telematic units and
development tools. Under-the-hood and safety critical applications are yet to
commercialise open source based products. In India there are infotainment and
telematics products already available in the market, that contain open
source software.
Now open source seems to have a lot
of positive rub offs on the technology front. Thus, do we see it being adopted
as a means of technology, beyond the infotainment industry? If yes, can you
elaborate?
Automotive sector including infotainment is
rather a late entrant into the open source sphere. Open source thrives where
accessibility is more. For example, standard hardware available to all and
software architecture designed with inter-operability in mind. That is the
reason why open source saw main adoption in the PC software market followed by
smart phone market (which followed the PC application development model).
Although there are open source embedded solutions based on AUTOSAR standard,
adoption inside the automotive beyond infotainment devices is yet to be seen.
How long did GM and Bosch take to
come out with development of CUE? Are there more surprises down the line and
can we look forward to many more innovations using this technology?
We get involved from concept stage itself.
It takes about 18 to 24 months for a matured product to roll out. The actual
product launch that is integrated in the car takes about 2.5 years. Further
development is ongoing with new features being added for new car lines and
variant in line with market trends.
Does this also throw up a new set of
challenges to the component industry? If so, in what manner?
Yes. The primary challenge is the change in
landscape of infotainment suppliers. A few years back, a tier-1 supplier
manufactured and supplied standalone infotainment devices to the OEM. The value
chain is completely broken now. Today’s infotainment systems are made up of are
multiple hardware boxes, supplied by different vendors, containing software
supplied by tier-2 or tier-3 firms, open source software components from the
community and all of these integrated together by an altogether different
system integrator. Reliance on a development community or a third party company
becomes necessary to integrate varied open source components into one system.
Another challenge in using open source components is that most of the open
source software have explicit disclaimer for warranty, and this cannot be
passed on to the OEM or the end user. Taking in a ‘no-warranty’ software and
assuring product liability to the end user is one of the biggest challenges for
the component industry.
For adoption of open source in the
auto industry, what are the immediate challenges that would be confronted by
auto makers?
First of all, the quality implications: An
open source project may provide the source code with explicit warranty
disclaimer, but for the OEM, a critical field defect could mean a recall. This
means huge monetary loss and damage to reputation.
Secondly,
the legal implications: To use open source successfully, one needs to be aware
of the license terms and must fulfill the necessary obligations. Failure to do
that will result in legal proceedings that can end in loss of intellectual
property, monetary loss and damage to reputation. There are hundreds of various
open source licenses. Understanding each one of them and fulfilling the
obligations is a challenge.
Lastly,
automotive industries have been known for their extreme protection of
intellectual property and trade secrets. Getting timely support from an open
source community of developers is not easy for an industry with such
background. Also the automakers have to move towards more standardization and
collaboration. There are initiatives
like “GENIVI”, which is a non-profit
industry alliance committed to driving the broad adoption of an In-Vehicle
Infotainment (IVI) open-source development platform. But it is a cultural change for the industry
with a long heritage.