Overview

The Autoware Safety Island is a Zephyr RTOS application 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 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 Zephyr 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 to Zephyr mapping

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

ROS 2 (rcl)	Zephyr equivalent
Logging	Custom logger (include/common/logger/logger.hpp)
Node	POSIX threads on Zephyr stacks (include/common/node/node.hpp)
Timers	Zephyr software timers
Publisher / Subscriber	CycloneDDS (include/common/dds/)