QinetiQ Selects Aonix® PERC® for Taranis UAV

Aonix announced the selection of the PERC Ultra virtual machine for Taranis, a $166.6M UK technology demonstrator program for the next-generation of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD).

BAE Systems is the industry lead and prime contractor for the program and QinetiQ is providing the Reasoning Layer of the Autonomy Mission System making the high level plans which control the flight path and sensor usage to achieve a mission. Taranis will be the largest UAV yet built in the UK and, as part of the UK MoD’s Strategic Unmanned Air Vehicle (Experiment) SUAV(E) program, will explore and demonstrate how emerging technologies and systems can deliver battle-winning capabilities for the UK armed forces.

The Taranis Reasoning Layer needs to run complex decision-making and optimization algorithms on an embedded processor. QinetiQ chose PERC because PERC enables existing Java code and libraries to be used in an embedded environment while providing the necessary support for soft real-time operation. Following extensive evaluation, QinetiQ found PERC Ultra as the most practical solution to meet the project requirements on its chosen embedded processor and real-time operating system. QinetiQ needed access to PERC’s efficient AOT compilation and static loading capabilities as well as the ability to connect to existing libraries of C++ routines.

Taranis represents a significant step forward in UAV capability, with its focus being targeting and attack rather than the surveillance and reconnaissance roles for which previous UAV programs had been designed. Accomplishing these goals requires QinetiQ to do much more with the system, to ensure it is capable of high-level decision making to support deep operations. Named after the Celtic God of Thunder, Taranis will be an unmanned fast jet demonstrator the size of a Hawk trainer.

“We chose to develop the Taranis Reasoning Layer with Java due to the broad range of capabilities of that platform, but we needed PERC Ultra to support practical deployment in a real-time, embedded environment,” said Peter Baynham, managing director of QinetiQ’s Command & Intelligence Systems business. “Support for our chosen architecture and ability to integrate with existing libraries were also key factors.”

“Taranis is the latest win for PERC Ultra in the growing autonomous vehicle market, and it’s particularly exciting to be working with QinetiQ because the mission requirements of Taranis represents proof of the power and productivity that Java technology can bring to complex, high-intelligence embedded and real-time systems,” said Adrian Larkham, Aonix UK General Manager.

PERC Ultra has many competitive advantages that have made it the virtual machine of choice among mission-critical Java developers. PERC offers great flexibility to get the job done, with more execution modes, higher throughput, and better predictability than the nearest competitors. The PERC Ultra real-time garbage collection system is mature and proven through over a decade of use in critical applications worldwide, and the current PERC Ultra release supports versions of the Java JDK up to three versions more recent than competitive offerings.

With hundreds of thousands of deployments, PERC is the most widely used virtual machine technology for mission-critical applications. The PERC Ultra virtual machine offers rich JSE™-based capabilities, and predictable garbage collection, while PERC Pico provides the low-level access and small latencies that are often required for close-to-the-silicon applications. PERC technologies are more predictable and reliable than other Java solutions, while offering much higher productivity and lower lifetime costs than C/C++ applications development. 

Aonix Supplies Safety-Critical Java™ Virtual Machine and Real-time Expertise to DIANA

Aonix announced that Aonix had been chosen to participate in DIANA (Distributed equipment Independent environment for Advanced avioNic Applications). DIANA, funded by the European Community at $4.26M, is chartered to modernize the tools and execution environments used in hard real-time and safety-certifiable avionics systems in order to reduce the development and ongoing operational costs of aircraft. Aonix will provide PERC Pico technology and virtual machine standards experience to support the DIANA initiative. 

Aimed at keeping Europe’s competitive edge in air transportation, DIANA will implement an integrated modular electronics platform that will reduce aircraft development and operating costs, enable faster upgrade and replacement of avionics applications, and reduce onboard weight through better use of computational resources. DIANA will develop architecture, methodologies and concepts that enable the avionics supply chain to deliver enhanced functionality in a significantly smaller time frame.

 “DIANA is an important project for the European Community,” said Laurent Mares, Aonix vice president of sales Europe. “Due to the intense scrutiny and certification cycles applied to avionics systems, the cost of bringing new airframes to market is staggering. Modernizing methodologies, languages and execution environments in a standard way will improve time to market and dramatically reduce development cost for some of the most expensive systems being built today.”

The project will bring some of the most influential and useful technologies together with existing or emerging standards relevant to avionics development and deployment. Under the umbrella of AIDA (Architecture for Independent Distributed Avionics), DIANA will define and promote common development and certification processes and strategies. Object-oriented technologies such as Java, and standards such as ARINC 653 multipartitioned operating environment specification for avionics; Real Time Specification for Java (RTSJ) and its subset JSR-302, the Java solution for safety-critical applications; Object Management Group’s Common Object Request Broker (CORBA) for middleware and the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) are all being considered as guidance for the project.

Aonix’s PERC Pico will provide the underpinning executional foundation for DIANA. The PERC Pico product implements key concepts of the evolving JSR-302 standard. PERC Pico delivers the portability and scalability benefits of Java to developers of low-level software components which have demanding performance, memory footprint, response time, and determinism requirements. As such, PERC Pico is ideal for many hard real-time and safety-critical development projects. Compared with traditional Java technologies, PERC Pico has a much smaller and simpler run-time environment, making it possible to economically develop the safety certification artifacts required by government auditors of applications such as commercial avionics, nuclear power generation, passenger rail, and medical instrumentation.

Since early 2003, Aonix has worked closely with the Open Group, a vendor-neutral industry consortium that supports the creation of standards for integrated information and global interoperability, to establish standards for the use of Java in the development of safety-critical software systems. In July 2006, this work was transitioned into the Java Community Process as Java Specification Request (JSR) 302, and an expert group was formed to address the issues of safety-critical development with Java. Aonix is a member of this expert group. Work on JSR-302 is ongoing. Aonix intends to refine its PERC Pico product to assure full compliance with the JSR-302 standard once that standard becomes official.

In this effort, Aonix joins key players in the European and global markets. Dassault Aviation, Alenia Aeronautica, and Embraer (all air framers/system integrators), and Thales Avionics (provider and system integrator of avionics applications), will participate in definition and implementation activities together with Budapest University of Technology and Economics, University of Karlsrhue, and the Dutch National Aerospace Laboratory (NLR). Skysoft Portugal (a aeronautics, Security, Space and Telematics technology and systems provider) is prime contractor for DIANA, and alongside of Alenia SIA and Aonix will provide the simulation development and all COTS tools to be used by project participants.

Throughout specification and implementation stages, the DIANA team will work with EUROCAE WG71 to the develop certification guidelines for the new concepts adopted in AIDA like object-oriented programming, Java programming, MDE, model transformation, etc.

Aonix Provides PERC Ultra Java™ Virtual Machine Technology and Security Expertise to TECOM

Aonix announced its participation in TECOM, Trusted Embedded COMputing, an Information Technology for European Advancement (ITEA) project chartered to create solutions and architectures for integrity and security requirements. TECOM, budgeted at 1516639 €, is developing a trusted secure execution environment capable of withstanding the increasing number of external security attacks. Aonix will provide the PERC Ultra virtual machine and its expertise in security and complex embedded systems to the TECOM project.

With the increasing dependency on embedded systems, embedded devices are becoming more complex, dynamic, heterogeneous, and progressively connected. As a consequence, the reliability and security of these systems have become a major concern, particularly since external security attacks primarily at the IT level have eroded people’s confidence. Aonix along with the ITEA consortium aims to create an integrity and security platform that can gain user acceptance and the confidence of the market.

“TECOM establishes a foundation for trusted computing that will assure the marketplace that embedded systems are secure,” noted Laurent Mares, Aonix vice president of sales Europe. “With the increased connection of embedded devices to the worldwide Internet, security has become critical. We are proud to share Aonix’s expertise in designing trusted environments in the embedded world with the TECOM consortium.” 

TECOM concepts will be validated with a set of miscellaneous applications like video control, Digital Rights management and home-control applications. Since many of these applications will be developed in Java, Aonix’s PERC Ultra plays an essential role in the trusted execution environment. PERC Ultra delivers the portability and scalability benefits of Java to developers of trusted software components. Coupled with its real-time performance and determinism, PERC Ultra becomes an ideal component for porting trusted execution environments to the many different hardware platforms found in embedded devices today. 

Aonix will adapt its PERC virtual machine technology in two ways.  First, it will be integrated with the TECOM middleware security layer and TECOM trusted operating systems.  Aonix will also participate in a home-control demonstration application using the OSGi framework. OSGi provides support for multi-application systems that could potentially lead to major security issues by one application preventing others to execute properly. This kind of threat can be avoided with partitioning execution environments in which each partition is assigned a fixed set of resources. The PERC virtual machine will be adapted to take advantage of such partitioning features.  

In this TECOM project, Aonix joins key players in the European and global markets. EADS, Thomson, Trango, Trialog, Fagor, Ikerlan, Visual Tools, Technikon will participate in definition and implementation activities together with Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia.

Aonix Makes Great Strides in Europe

Aonix celebrated a solid year of growth with the launch of a second French office devoted to professional services. The new office, centered in Toulouse, France’s heartland for aeronautic and space industries, will provide expertise in real-time and embedded solutions in Java and Ada languages.

Complementing this increased support for the customer service needs of France's industrial heartland has been the dramatic adoption of Aonix's Java language technologies in Germany. Sectors such as automotive and industrial control applications have readily embraced the PERC Ultra and PERC Pico solutions that Aonix brings to the table. PERC Ultra is a virtual machine and toolset expressly created for demanding embedded and real-time systems requiring J2SE™ support. PERC Pico, a virtual machine designed for hard real-time applications requiring fast execution, small footprint, and access to low-level devices, can work in conjunction with PERC Ultra or stand-alone in an resource-constrained embedded system

"Like the rest of the world, Europe has undergone significant changes in the way it does business, and Aonix has responded to that challenge," noted Laurent Mares, Aonix Vice President of Sales in Europe. "Industries today are much more concerned about development efficiency. They save overall development costs with the use of our leading-edge tools and our expertise in the real-time, mission-critical aspects of their applications."

Speaking about the shifts in the German market, Mares added, "Thanks to our PERC family, Aonix customers gain a Java solution that is both real-time and embedded. The superior networking and portability of the Java language makes it a natural fit for many engineering solutions and, as a result, Aonix is enabling customers to improve the productivity and reliability of their development of car diagnostic systems, intelligent traffic management solutions, automation and networked applications."

The Toulouse office creates an opportunity for Aonix to extend partnerships that it has had with many companies in the southwest region of France for several years. Aonix has added to the breadth of its current team, already recognized for its highly technical expertise, with a broader range of embedded and real-time software capabilities, including design and development (Java, Ada, C/C++), modeling, development environment support, validation, testing and certification. Equipped with a larger team located in France's industrial heartland, Aonix will be able to offer the responsiveness and flexibility of customers today.

German license sales for PERC products more than doubled in 2007 while overall PERC license sales for all of Europe are tracked close behind. This strong performance has prompted Aonix to increase its sales operations in Germany as well.