One article to understand autonomous driving domain controllers

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You bought a single-family villa ready to decorate, in order to facilitate life, you have laid out a number of top lights, sweeping robots, air conditioners and other equipment for each room, with more and more equipment, you find that each device has an independent switch, each time you use these equipment to operate one by one, very inconvenient, with the purchase of more equipment, the need for more switches is also more and more, want to open a device before you also need to think about where the corresponding switch is, which leads to each use of the device to spend more and more time, At this time, you find that you can integrate the switch of the equipment in each room into a control panel, label the corresponding device switch, and when you need to use these devices, you can directly control the corresponding equipment through this control panel, which is not only convenient, but also more convenient.

Such as more and more equipment for room decoration, more and more corresponding switches, the time and energy required to find the corresponding switch are also more and more similar, under the development trend of automobile intelligence and networking, the original ECU-based distributed automotive electronic and electrical architecture has also exposed many problems and challenges, the core of the traditional car's functional system is ECU, the upgrade of intelligent functions depends on the accumulation of the number of ECUs and sensors, with the acceleration of the intelligent upgrade of bicycles, automotive intelligent functions such as airbags, anti-lock braking systems, Electric power steering, body electronic stability system, intelligent instruments, entertainment audio and video systems, power battery management systems, etc. are constantly superimposed, the supporting lines are constantly complex, and the original intelligent upgrade method is facing problems such as the surge in research and development and production costs, insufficient computing power, and reduced security, and how to ensure data processing and network security optimization has become a problem.

In order to solve these problems, the concept of automotive domain controller was proposed, similar to room decoration to integrate the switch of each room into a control panel, the domain controller is to integrate the original isolated ECUs with each other, through one or several "central brains" to control the ECU and sensors of the whole car, so that many similar but separate ECU functions are integrated into a processor hardware platform that is more powerful than ECU, and the proposal of the domain controller makes the research and development cost of the car intelligent upgrade gradually reduce. Let the acceleration of the landing of automobile intelligence become a reality.

With the traditional automotive distributed electronic architecture, each ECU is connected together by THE CAN bus and the LIN bus, with the superposition of functions, the entire system is more and more complex and different, and the integrated domain controller processing scheme makes the automotive electronic network topology more simple. Domain controller as the center of automotive computing, decision-making, the realization of functions mainly depends on the main control chip, software operating system and middleware, application algorithms and other multi-level software and hardware organic combination, mainly can be divided into domain master processor, operating system, application software and algorithms and other 3 parts, the main core design ideas of domain controllers are platformization, high integration, high performance and good compatibility.

Due to the high integration of multiple ECU functions together, domain controllers can greatly reduce development costs and manufacturing costs, accelerate the intelligent development of automobiles, in order to better realize the integration of different functions, the development core of domain controllers is the acceleration of chip computing power, can make public information system components, can be distributed and executed in software, so that software and hardware are separated, can achieve sufficient resources to quickly respond to complete customer needs, with platform, compatibility, high integration, good performance and other advantages.

Similar to the room decoration mentioned above, which integrates the switches of each room into a control panel, the design of the domain controller will also have multiple divisions, and different OEMs will divide the main function of the car into several different domains due to different design concepts. For example, BOSCH divides the car into power domain, body domain, chassis domain, cockpit domain and automatic driving domain, which is also the most classic five-domain centralized electronic and electrical architecture, and some manufacturers will further integrate on the basis of the five-domain centralized electronic and electrical architecture, integrate the power domain, body domain, chassis domain into the vehicle control domain controller, and build a three-domain centralized electronic and electrical architecture of the vehicle control domain controller, intelligent driving domain controller, and intelligent cockpit domain controller. For example, Volkswagen's MEB platform and Huawei's CC architecture mainly adopt a three-domain centralized electronic and electrical architecture. The five-domain centralized electronic and electrical architecture integrates all the control functions of L3 and above level autonomous vehicles.

Power domain: that is, the safety domain, is an intelligent powertrain management unit, mainly used for the optimization and control of the powertrain, in electric vehicles mainly refers to the integration of electric drive and electronic control system, while having both electrical intelligent fault diagnosis, intelligent power saving, bus communication and other functions.

Body domain: The body domain is mainly to gradually transition the decentralized function combination to integrate all the body electronic control functions, and the control of the whole body such as brake lights, tailgate locks and other equipment is integrated together, which can effectively reduce the weight of the vehicle and reduce the control cost of each component.

Chassis domain: The chassis domain is mainly related to the driving of the car, is the driving system, transmission system, steering system and brake system integration, mainly responsible for the connection of the various driving components of the car, power transmission, steering, braking and other functions, is the main control domain of the car as a travel tool, the development of the chassis domain is also the key factor of whether the autonomous vehicle can land. Similar to the power domain, most of the control systems involved in the chassis domain have high safety level requirements and need to comply with the ASIL-D safety level (the highest safety level in the ASIL series). Therefore, chassis domains also have a high industry threshold, and most chassis domain controllers are still in the lab stage.

Cockpit domain: The cockpit domain is mainly responsible for the functions of the automotive cockpit electronic system, integrating functions including intelligent cockpits such as instrument combinations, central control large screens, head-up displays, etc. Unlike the traditional cockpit, which is composed of several decentralized subsystems or separate modules, the cockpit domain needs to have excellent processability, and complex intelligent cockpit functions such as multi-screen linkage and multi-screen driving can become a reality;

Autonomous driving domain: the automatic driving domain needs to have multi-sensor fusion, positioning, path planning, wireless communication, decision control, high-speed communication and other capabilities, the automatic driving domain needs to be connected to hardware equipment such as millimeter-wave radar, lidar, vehicle cameras, inertial navigation and other hardware equipment, so as to achieve automatic driving perception, decision-making ability, the core of which is the processing power of the chip, the ultimate goal is to achieve the computing power requirements of automatic driving, simplify equipment, and improve the integration of automatic driving systems. The autonomous driving domain is also responsible for the safety and security of the underlying core data and networked data of the car in the autonomous driving state, and is the core component of promoting higher-level automatic driving at L3 and above.

With the development of domain controllers, its advantages are gradually highlighted, the development of domain controllers on the requirements of computing power requirements are also gradually improved, but also to promote the development of domain controllers and chips, from distributed electronic and electrical architecture to centralized electronic and electrical architecture, the emergence of domain controllers, will require multiple ECUs to complete the function, integrated into a domain control to achieve, so that the control of various parts of the car becomes more efficient. The development of domain controllers has also made the functions of various parts of the car more integrated, and the functions of the car can be controlled through a brain, which can make the transmission of data more efficient and the systems of various parts of the car more interconnected.

In the field of automatic driving, the main core of competition is the cockpit domain and the automatic driving domain, and the realization of automatic driving mainly relies on the technological improvement of these two domain controls, and the integrated control terminal can make the commercial landing process of automatic driving faster. At this stage, the development of domain controllers has long faced some software and technical problems, and in the mass production process is also facing high technical engineering requirements, short development cycle, supply chain assurance and other multi-faceted challenges, but domain controllers are undoubtedly a good solution for future automatic driving landing, for domain controllers, what do you think? Welcome to pay attention to the forefront of intelligent driving, and leave a message to communicate.

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