Stanford Seminar - From open-source to safety-certified robotic software

January 27, 2023 Jan Becker of Apex.ai For decades, automotive and robotics developers have reinvented the software wheel many times. With its launch in 2010, ROS has enabled rapid software prototyping and reuse of software in prototyping and development. In 2018, the launch of ROS 2 further improved ROS and its architecture and ROS 2 now provides an efficient prototyping and rapid development platform. But the lack of real-time performance and safety certification still prevents the wide-scale adoption of ROS-based software into products in safety-critical products. In this talk, we will discuss the state of the art in robotics and automotive software and how we have taken ROS from an open-source project to a safety-certified robotic and automotive software development kit. About the speaker: Jan Becker is President, CEO and Co-Founder of Apex.AI, Inc. He is also the Managing Director of the Apex.AI GmbH. Prior to founding Apex.AI, he was Senior Director at Faraday Future responsible for Autonomous Driving and Director at Robert Bosch LLC responsible for Automated Driving in North America. He also served as a Senior Manager and Principal Engineer at the Bosch Research and Technology Center in Palo Alto, CA, USA, and as a senior research engineer for Corporate Research at Robert Bosch GmbH, Germany. Since 2010, Jan is a Lecturer at Stanford University for autonomous vehicles and driver assistance. Previously, he was a visiting scholar at the University’s Artificial Intelligence Lab and a member of the Stanford Racing Team for the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. In 2019, Jan was appointed to serve on the external Advisory Board of MARELLI to provide strategic advice to the MARELLI Board. In 2018, he co-founded the Autoware Foundation and was on the foundation’s board of directors until 2020. ​Jan earned a Ph.D. in control engineering from the Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany, a master’s degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering from the State Unive