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Android Automotive
Karim Yaghmour - Watch Now - Duration: 01:04:06
Android's use in the automotive industry has been silently increasing over the past few years. While Android's use in a car inherits quite a few things from classic Embedded Android, there are several automotive-related additions to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) that are worth a closer look. This session will cover the Car System Service, the internal Car system APIs, the built-in Car Apps, the car-related HIDLs and car-related specific features such as Exterior View System, Vehicle Properties, Audio, Power Management, wear leveling and boot time optimizations.
Hello sir! Thank you for sharing.
Hello Karim, thank you for a great presentation. I was particularly interested about your thoughts on wear leveling in Android, a lot can be done on the file system level to extend the lifetime of the eMMC and storage media. I encourage you to watch Thom Denholm's talk here: https://www.embeddedonlineconference.com/session/How_to_avoid_end_of_life_from_NAND_correctable_errors and reach out to him if you have any questions.
Oh, great. Thanks for that. I'll definitely check it out and get in touch with Thom if need be.
Much appreciated.
Karim
Is Google deprecating the phone projection model in favor of an in-car unit? I quite enjoy the android auto model where e.g. I can continue what I was listening to on my phone when driving in the car.
The car unit would obviously need more CPU oomph to drive the cluster and communicate with other ECUs, but this I imagine would be more hardened and less update prone software than the infotainment.
I can't say they're deprecating it, at least not explicitly-- though, again, I don't speak for them. It remains that as new models come out it makes sense if the full Android runs on the IVI instead of just serving projection. It feels like the projection mode is an evolutionary path. But who knows. As you likely know the car business is different and products are planned a long time ahead of release. So we're going to have to wait and see.
Karim
How would audio be categorized as mission critical?
If the system uses it for parking and lane departure warnings and there is no fall-back loudspeaker e.g. in the instrument cluster, it's now safety relevant and falls under ISO26262.
It looks like all of the Audio in Android is assumed to not be mission critical, hence the use of an external mixer under Android that takes the important audio notifications and mixes them with Android's audio output.
Karim
Would Android Automative have direct access to the CAN bus?
I think this is likely something underneath the HAL. So not so much an application thing, but rather as one of the ways by which the Automotive HALs communicates with the rest of the car. If there are plans for a CAN API I haven't seen it.
Karim
Do you think IVI developer adoption will be decreased by Google's history of terminating platforms like Android Things? Or does Google have critical mass that developers need to follow?
I can't speak for Google or anyone for that matter. But I think this is a bit different. At the end of the day this is likely closer to the handset model than Android Things. Handsets existed before and would continue existing whether Android is there or not. Same with cars. The question is what do the vendors do if Google pulls the plug. And the answer likely is that Android is OSS. So if Google went down a path the vendors didn't like, they could always elect to fork. In the case of Android Things the strategy was that partners/vendors needed to use binary images provided by google for specific SOMs. I personally never saw that as a viable strategy. Partners/vendors need to be able to walk away and still have their NRE not be lost. That I think is true for Automotive.
At least, that's how I see it. But again, all opinions mine :)
Karim
They saved the best for last :)
Ha, Thanks Drew, much appreciated :)
Enjoy the show and let me know if you have any questions.
Karim
Hi,
I'll be available to answer your questions here.
Thanks for participating.
Karim
Hello Karim,
Excellent presentation putting together all the important parts of the puzzle unerthed from the AOSP sources. Any thoughts on the OTA upgradability of Android automotive ? Will it be similar to what the OEMs support today ? Similary will the there be a Play Store exclusively for Android Automotive ? Does this new architecture address V2V (vehicle-2-vehicle) interaction as well ?
Regards,
Anil