GM has announced that their 2013 Cadillac XTS, ATS and SRX luxury sedans, will feature a vibrating driver seat to help prevent crashes. GM’s Directional Tactile Sensation feature is designed to warn the driver of crash threats while driving and parking.
Raymond Kiefer, General Motors Active Safety Technical Fellow: “Vibrating alerts may help drivers who do not hear beeping alerts due to hearing loss or competing noises, and may be preferred by drivers and passengers who might be annoyed by beeps and shut crash-avoidance features off.”
General Motors is recalling the 2012 Buick Regal for, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, “failing to comply with the requirements of federal motor vehicle safety standard number 108: lamps, reflective devices and associated equipment.”
The NHTSA states a software error is responsible for the defect; causing the parking lamps to fail to activate when either the headlamps or parking lamps are turned on.
While this defect is not a major issue, it could reduce the visibility of the vehicle and increase the potential for a crash.
According to Consumer Reports, “this flaw violates U.S. safety standards and may cause an increased risk of vehicle collisions due to reduced visibility of the Buick car.”
San Jose, CA — [via] – LynuxWorks, Inc., the first and only embedded operating system vendor to receive Advisory Circular AC 20-148 approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for reusable software components (RSC), has received its second RSC approval for the LynxOS-178 product family.
Today, with RSC approval, the LynxOS-178 Version 2.2.2 RTOS (real-time operating system) can be more extensively used by avionics systems integrators and embedded developers for the operating system portion of the safety-critical software code and supporting DO-178B artifacts for reuse in other system designs with other software components without the need for full recertification.
“More than ever, software component use in safety-critical software for embedded military applications or avionics flight systems is critical,” said Stephen Balacco, director, Embedded Software and Tools Practice, VDC Research Group, Inc. “With RSC approval, the software components identified as reusable are already approved by the FAA.” The OS provider chooses software components that are target hardware-independent, such as the kernel and libraries, which can constitute as much as 65% of the code. From that perspective, RSC approval provides system integrators and developers a tremendous head start when a significant amount of the operating system is already approved.
According to the VP of Engineering for LynuxWorks, Arun Subbarao, “LynxOS-178 was designed solely for safety-critical applications. The standards-based approach for software reuse in airborne systems and equipment offers a ‘software black box’ solution that can significantly reduce the time and cost of achieving FAA certification and further reduce the risk involved in redevelopment efforts across multiple safety-critical systems.”
In 2006, the LynxOS-178 RSC RTOS was initially approved for the Rockwell Collins Adaptive Flight Display Runtime, Common Computing Runtime, and Data Concentration Module Runtime for Pro Line Fusion. Rockwell Collins offers a family of flexible avionics system solutions designed to address a wide range of aircraft and missions — from light turboprops to long-range business jets, from commercial helicopters to special missions aircraft.
A Standards-Based Approach for Reuse LynxOS-178 addresses system developers’ need to meet FAA certification by providing a time, space and resource partitioned commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) operating system that fully satisfies the objectives of the DO-178B, level A and the ARINC 653 standard as well as full conformance with the IEEE POSIX Standard. Currently, any time a systems integrator or developer wants to integrate components of any other RTOS, or any previously certified DO-178B software in multiple hardware environments, each new hardware/software configuration or system must be recertified. In other words, integrators and developers cannot take full advantage of the software’s existing certification across other multiple platforms, but instead must go through the entire certification process for each new system they build. The RSC acceptance letter from the FAA for LynxOS-178 can be used to support virtually any FAA Technical Standard Order.
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