Real-Time OS and Hypervisor for Robotics and Automation

Equipment failure in robotics and automation systems can cause catastrophic injury and significant revenue loss. These systems must run precisely and reliably, ensuring that the highest-priority processes run first, and they must be able to recover from faults autonomously. BlackBerry^® QNX^® operating systems are in hundreds of millions of systems worldwide and clients around the globe rely on our safety and security experts.

The QNX microkernel OS architecture provides the temporal and spatial isolation needed to ensure system functional safety. It is the foundation for the QNX Neutrino RTOS and QNX OS for Safety, and the QNX Hypervisor and QNX Hypervisor for Safety, which enable you to consolidate diverse operating systems on a single system on a chip (SoC) while protecting safety-critical systems.

Linux and Robot OS (ROS) are popular for prototypes, but compliance with safety standards such as IEC 61508 (industrial), ISO 26262 (automotive), IEC 61511 (process instrumentation) and IEC 62304 (medical) is more complex and costly with an open-source OS—and can pull your best developers away from new product development and revenue generation.

With the QNX SDP, developers can leverage their skills and knowledge to ramp up quickly. You can easily port from Linux and other open-source projects, including ROS, OpenCV, Boost and Tensor Flow, to the POSIX-compliant QNX development environment and the QNX Neutrino RTOS or QNX OS for Safety, as well as run mixed-criticality systems on the QNX Hypervisor and QNX Hypervisor for Safety.

A robotics or automation system breach can put workers, bystanders and your company at risk. Additionally, your robots may need to operate in demanding environments—from an IEC 80001-conformant healthcare IT network to the deepest parts of the ocean—so security needs to be built-in across the entire system, including your OS.

A secure system requires a secure OS, secure over-the-air software updates, a secure supply chain, managed PKI authentication and FIPS-certified encryption. The QNX Neutrino RTOS microkernel architecture reduces the attack surface available to cyberthreats and provides multi-layered protection with system-wide security policies, path trust, fortified functions, access controls, security tooling and separation and isolation mechanisms.

Reusing application and driver code across products lines and lines of business helps you scale your software development and streamline new product introductions so you can drive more revenue. When you use the QNX Neutrino RTOS, you offload OS maintenance to BlackBerry QNX while building a standard set of drivers and applications that you can reuse or adapt throughout your organization, saving time, resources and total cost of ownership.

You can easily port from Linux and other open-source projects, including ROS, OpenCV, Boost and Tensor Flow, to the POSIX-compliant QNX development environment and the QNX Neutrino RTOS or QNX OS for Safety, as well as run mixed-criticality systems on the QNX Hypervisor and QNX Hypervisor for Safety.

Safety certification to standards such as IEC 61508 or IEC 62304 is a huge undertaking—and an almost insurmountable challenge with software of unknown provenance (SOUP) such as Linux. A safety-certified OS or hypervisor can significantly reduce the complexity, cost, risk and duration of your certification processes and help ensure the success of your project.

BlackBerry QNX solutions are designed with a focus on the safety, security and real-time determinism needed for the next generation of robotics and automation systems. To help reduce your development and certification costs and timelines, QNX OS for Safety is pre-certified by TÜV Rheinland for use in applications requiring compliance up to IEC 61508 SIL 3  and IEC 62304 Class C. QNX Hypervisor for Safety is certified to IEC 61508 SIL 3.