To ease certification of embedded systems with functional safety requirements many vendors of MCUs provide “Functional Safety Design Packages” (e.g. SafeTI of Texas Instruments, STMicroelectronics).
These design packages contain:
- SW/hardware abstraction libraries (HAL) for the MCU
- documentation about the design (basis for certification(s) of “design package”), e.g. refer to Functional Safety Design Patterns
- “design package” certification document(s) (to justify suitability for system integration of the “design package”)
- documentation about “Failure Mode and Effects Analysis” (FMEA) and “Failure Modes, Effects and Diagnostic Analysis” (FMEDA) to ease certification of the overall system
The same approach used by these vendors on the MCU/HAL level could be adapted to ROS2 on various levels as well. E.g. H-ROS system components, higher level application SW components, etc.
Adopting a “design package” approach would help to:
- save vendor specific resources
- enable acceptance of ROS2 in the industry
- establish ROS2 as a standard in robotics with broad acceptance (not limited to research and low risk domains and applications but higher risk domains and applications as well)