Overview

The Autoware Safety Island is an actuation module that runs Autoware’s trajectory follower on an Arm safety-class processor. It consumes planning, localization, and vehicle-state topics from the Autoware main compute, runs MPC lateral and PID longitudinal control, and publishes control commands back out over DDS. No changes to the upstream Autoware codebase are required.

The module supports Zephyr and FreeRTOS runtime targets for both local validation and S32Z hardware development. A platform abstraction layer (actuation_module/include/platform/) keeps the controller logic shared between runtime backends.

Runtime targets

Runtime	Local validation	S32Z hardware
Zephyr	zephyr-fvp	zephyr-s32z
FreeRTOS	freertos-posix	freertos-s32z2

zephyr-fvp and freertos-posix are validated local development targets. zephyr-fvp also covers AVH workflows. zephyr-s32z is the existing S32Z Zephyr hardware target. freertos-s32z2 is hardware-specific and requires NXP-licensed SDK inputs.

The main compute and the safety island run on separate DDS domains. A domain bridge on the main compute forwards the relevant topics between them, which isolates the real-time controller from the rest of the Autoware graph.

Workflow

graph TD subgraph Inputs Trajectory["Trajectory<br/>(TrajectoryMsg_Raw)"] Odometry["Odometry<br/>(OdometryMsg)"] Steering["Steering<br/>(SteeringReportMsg)"] Acceleration["Acceleration<br/>(AccelWithCovarianceStampedMsg)"] OperationMode["Operation Mode<br/>(OperationModeStateMsg)"] end subgraph "Actuation Module" ControllerNode["Controller Node<br/><br/>Lateral Controller: MPC<br/>Longitudinal Controller: PID"] end subgraph Outputs ControlCommand["Control Command<br/>(ControlMsg)"] end Trajectory --> ControllerNode Odometry --> ControllerNode Steering --> ControllerNode Acceleration --> ControllerNode OperationMode --> ControllerNode ControllerNode --> ControlCommand

See DDS topics for the full list of DDS topics with message types and domain IDs, and Architecture for the runtime design.

Main Components

Component	Version
Zephyr RTOS	3.6.0
CycloneDDS	0.11.x
Autoware	2025.02
Autoware.Universe	0.40.0
Autoware.msgs	1.3.0

Autoware Components

The following Autoware packages are vendored into actuation_module/src/autoware/ and compiled as part of the safety island application.

Component	Role
autoware_msgs	Message definitions (IDL)
autoware_osqp_interface	OSQP solver wrapper for MPC
autoware_universe_utils	General utilities
autoware_motion_utils	Motion primitives
autoware_interpolation	Trajectory interpolation
autoware_vehicle_info_utils	Vehicle model parameters
autoware_trajectory_follower_base	Controller base classes
autoware_mpc_lateral_controller	MPC lateral controller
autoware_pid_longitudinal_controller	PID longitudinal controller
autoware_trajectory_follower_node	Controller node entry point

ROS RCL abstraction mapping

Autoware code is written against ROS 2’s rcl layer. In this project the equivalents are built directly on runtime primitives, so no ROS 2 runtime is needed on the safety island runtime target.

ROS 2 (rcl)	Safety-island equivalent
Logging	Custom logger (include/common/logger/logger.hpp)
Node	POSIX-style thread wrapper with platform-provided stacks (include/common/node/node.hpp and include/platform/)
Timers	Runtime timer wrapper (include/common/node/timer.hpp)
Publisher / Subscriber	CycloneDDS (include/common/dds/)