Accelerating the time to market for air mobility
UK-based flight control specialists Callen-Lenz and California’s Lynx Software Technologies, developer of open, mixed criticality and secure system development, have announced a strategic team to address the fast-developing air mobility, personal air vehicle and certified unmanned air system markets around the globe.
Lynx’s LynxSecure Safety Bundle (LSB) and Callen-Lenz’ development of flight control and vehicle management systems for unmanned and optionally manned aircraft, together provide a solution to rapid development of multi-core-based systems that offer critical SWaP-C (size, weight, power and cost) benefits. The system software architecture enables the rapid refresh of co-resident non-safety critical modules without affecting the overall safety certification.
In the near future, people will be carried in flying cars and large packages will be delivered by drones over the heads of the public. Developers of both types of vehicle will need to resolve the same technical and social challenges. The electronic systems that control them must be shown to be suitably safe, and the public will also demand the capabilities that they now have as standard in their automobiles and consumer devices. Manufacturers will need a solution that costs little and weighs less, whilst being capable of being updated and modernised without needing to unnecessarily repeat previous expensive safety certification.
When hosted on LynxSecure, the world’s only truly secure-by-design separation kernel hypervisor, the Callen-Lenz flight control software is able to run in its own partition, isolated from non-safety system functions in other partitions. Third party entertainment and communication software systems – indeed, any required system – can be added and modified without affecting the certification of safety critical applications and without requiring the porting of these non-safety-critical applications to a certifiable operating system or partitioning system.
Jonathan Webber, CEO Callen-Lenz, said: “The spectacular recent growth in development of personal air vehicles, air mobility solutions and beyond visual line of sight large unmanned aircraft will require a safe and secure design of avionics suitable for meeting the regulators’ needs whilst maintaining public and user confidence. Consumers will also expect entertainment, navigation and social media experiences similar to those that are commonplace in automobiles. Our avionics solutions provide this by design, and LynxSecure enables us to deliver a fully-integrated future-proof solution that will be the heart and brain of the vehicle now and in the future, whilst meeting the demands of regulators worldwide.
“The partnership between Lynx and Callen-Lenz provides a significant time-to-market boost for innovators targeting the huge opportunity of the emerging air mobility market,” added Lee Cresswell, Vice President, Sales, Lynx. “As a modular platform for rapidly building safe and secure embedded systems, the LynxSecure Safety Bundle is an ideal foundation for the development of the new generation of connected, semi-autonomous aircraft. The integration of our respective technologies enables the electronic systems at the heart of these vehicles to meet the rigorous safety demands of commercial avionics, whilst being delivered much more cost effectively.”
In a rapidly evolving and highly competitive market, the manufacturers of next generation aircraft will need to deliver solutions that meet the stringent demands of regulators, at the same time as exceeding consumer expectations for comfort and entertainment. Suppliers that are able to differentiate via software, delivering frequent refreshes containing compelling new features to users with no degradation in safety, are likely to gain competitive advantage. The complementary capabilities of Callen-Lenz and Lynx Software Technologies enable manufacturers to develop and maintain future-proof avionics architectures that will meet both regulatory and consumer expectations.
