Shift Magazine - February 2020 - 29

SOFTWARE, HEAL THYSELF
Israel's Aurora Labs
says it has cracked
the code for keeping
connected cars
up and running
BY DALE BUSS

A

urora Labs is trying to advance
a world in which the software in
automobiles is updated all at once
and over the air like that of smartphones - a goal that will become more of
an inevitability as electric and autonomous
vehicles continue to loom larger.
The 4-year-old startup, of Tel Aviv,
Israel, aims to help automakers keep in
sync the up to 150 million lines of software code that run today's vehicles - far
exceeding the 145,000 lines that were
necessary to land Apollo 11 on the moon
in 1969. And self-driving cars? They could
require up to 1 billion lines of code.
Running all the advanced features in
automated and connected vehicles means
not only keeping the software up to date,
but also tackling bugs that can impair critical vehicle functions.
Aurora says its software management product is ushering in the age of
"self-healing" software for cars.
The secret? Machine learning, a form
of artificial intelligence. Aurora uses it to
detect anomalies in software behavior
and predict when a "downtime event" is
likely, drilling all the way down to the lines
of code involved. It then can automatically fix the problem by rolling back to a
previous, safer version of the software,
doing an over-the-air update, then validating the behavior of the new software,
thus reducing downtime and recalls.
The company, which has about 25
employees in Israel and Germany, has
a deal with a European automaker that
is expected to deploy the system in a
vehicle by the end of this year. And it

Aurora Labs' "self-healing" software can detect problems and fix them over the air.

has started to work with U.S. and Asian
automakers, as well, said Roger Ordman,
executive vice president.
"Everyone is talking about end-to-end,
bumper-to-bumper software updates,"
Ordman said. "That's because OEMs
understand that it's a requirement to be
able to maintain and update software
through a car's lifetime."
Traditional "hardware functionality,"
he explained, "has been very self-contained." For example, if an automaker
wants a braking system, a Tier 1 supplier

can provide a turnkey system that the
automaker basically plugs into the vehicle.
And then, Ordman said, "it will continue to
work on day 1,000 as it did on day one."
"But software continues to evolve
and change, and the functionality that's
enabled by software isn't necessarily
provided by one supplier. If you want to
have, say, automatic parking, it has to
connect with the functionality of steering
and cameras and on-board communications. Software functions become more
systemwide and complex." n
february 2020 * shift

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Shift Magazine - February 2020

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