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Picture source: Jonn Lantz, AB Volvo.

Today, we had the Software Center reporting workshop, where we talked about software development and how it will look like in the future. The picture above shows how important the software is in the current truck.

In his keynote, our colleague showed how to design software in the large scale, when the commodity is important, but innovation is what shines out; in the world, where the platforms are important, but do not get the attention that they need.

This kind of approach means that you must be able to grasp both. One must design the software to meet all kinds of features that are relvant today and may be relevant tomorrow. When I see this, I think about ChatGPT, where the platform is the ChatGPT model that allows us to create own GPT-s based on that platform.

This also reminds me about platforms like Ollama or Torch, which allow us to build products fasts and customized to our needs. We can grab models, share them, train them, and (for a small fee) we can even deploy models based on this platform.

So, VECS 2024 is coming to an end, what have we learnt?

I think that I’ve experience an exciting two days full of talks. The most inspiring one, for me, was the talk about Volvo Cars build processes:

$ bezel build //car

I think this summarizes the Software Defined Vehicle. We’re not there yet, since virtualization and containerization is not fully ready, but we are close.

Some food for thought, inspired by Zenseact’s talk (my own words):

— how do we create AI models that evolve over time and do not require so much updates – this is an interesting question for the future
— timing constraints are the most important ones – you must be able to track and identify objects 50 FPS or more, otherwise it gets difficult from the practical perspective
— Large Vision Language Models – multimodal llms
— use bulk data for pre-training, trillions of tokens, especially when you add videos to these models; not possible to annotate automatically
— https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.13601
— https://github.com/NExT-GPT/NExT-GPT
— https://github.com/BradyFU/Awesome-Multimodal-Large-Language-Models
— https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.09611
— https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.13549

I think that we’re now living in a super-exciting time in automotive software engineering. Plus, it was quite refreshing to listen to something more than LLMs in software development.

Ok, I am a big fan of automotive software. Here are some of my notes from the Keynote by Alwin Bakkenes, Head of Software Engineering, Volvo Cars.

I am amazed how much this company evolved into a super-cool software company. Here are some of their practices and my notes:

— EX90, there is a dedicated data pipeline that can extract all kind of data from the car
— Volvo is able to train the modern models on their own NVidia platform/servers to put into the car later on
— all to make the product better over time and always to make it the safest Volvo ever.
— Speed, innovation, data and compute are the future of software development

— bazel build //car — cool slogan from Volvos software dev.

Key learnings

— superset architecture/products – create a product architecture/variants that can be configured via variants; this is important as it is connected to CI/CD in the pipeline.
— massive software testing – extremely important to be able to use the rigs and vehicles all connected and optimized; important that this is fully automated
— developer experience; Zuul, Gerrit, etc. are the important cornerstones for the development environment; including tools like Bazel; he lifts up the Zuul environment because of the parallel commits – they believe that the developer’s immediate feedback is important
— jfrog artifactory as part of their software development; part of the binary transfer process
— Bazel is a solution to their compilation time problem; it has a remote cache for the parts that are already compiled
— developer experience over IT department’s rules and regulations

This year, we had a chance to visit VECS 2024 and I could moderate Track A on electronics. Yes, I know, I’m a software engineer, but electronics is what our bits and bytes are actually running on.

VECS 2024 is all about SDV – Software Defined Vehicles – they are not here yet, but they will be, and they will be soon. SDV is all about making software driving the innovation of the automotive industry. We need to remember that this is not a playground for engineers (at least no officially), but it is a new experience for the customers.

Software, AI, Software and AI, AI and Software are the major drivers of the customer experience. OTA (Over the air updates), safety, infotainment, connectivity and electrification are really important here.

A quote of the day is from the first keynote – “Are you affraid of BYD’s chemists and Tesla’s coders?”, puts a finger on what this whole disruption is all about. 56 dollars per KWh of BYDs batteries is almost half the price of the competition. FSD is one of the most anticipated innovations and Tesla Model Y is the most sold vehicle model worldwide (I know we have a lot of models, so fragmentation is without parity, but still).

So, if there is a time to be in embedded software development in the automotive industry, it’s now.