The latest version of the industry-leading software framework, RTI Connext, is the first software framework designed to address the development and deployment challenges faced by companies building remotely-operated autonomous systems.

Autonomous systems must operate in inaccessible, remote, or hazardous environments. Examples include underwater drones, remotely-accessible medical devices, space systems, and construction and mining robots. Since artificial intelligence cannot handle all situations, these applications must use remote operators to supervise and intervene in difficult scenarios.

Connectivity for distributed control is extremely challenging. Applications require high reliability and real-time performance even though connectivity in these inhospitable environments is often unreliable and low bandwidth. Depending on the operator’s proximity, communication may also span local, wide area, public and private networks.

Connext 6.1 introduces features to enable easy real-time remote operation over any network. For instance, if the network connection changes as the system moves, connectivity is seamless without reconnecting, secure without renegotiating, and reliable without losing information. Thus, remote operations can continue in real time without interruption.

Enterprise networking assumes reliable, stable connections and latency insensitivity. Unlike other distributed software frameworks for the enterprise, Connext 6.1 supports and optimizes fast communications across highly variable local (LAN) and wide-area networks (WAN). Moreover, Connext 6.1 does not require software changes to support diverse network types. Its Application Programming Interfaces (API) abstracts the underlying networks, allowing developers to target any environment. Connext 6.1 offers the first practical design for control of remote autonomous systems.

New capabilities in Connext 6.1 that ease the development and deployment of geographically distributed systems include:

•Real-Time WAN Transport provides reliable, low latency and secure communication over lossy, low bandwidth, and public networks. It supports Network Address Translation (NAT) traversal and mobile applications with changing Internet addresses.
•Cloud Discovery Service simplifies deployment of dynamic systems in which applications, assets, and their network addresses may not be known at configuration time. It provides a means for applications to discover each other and directly communicate, peer-to-peer. This minimizes latency and maximizes throughput. It is far superior to traditional centralized broker solutions.
•Built-in data compression improves efficiency over bandwidth-constrained networks. Compression maximizes bandwidth use, lowering overhead and latency while increasing throughput. A choice of compression algorithms and levels allows optimization of processor versus network utilization for different payload types.

“The WAN Transport feature is one of the fastest and easiest ways to achieve peer-to-peer UDP WAN communication, especially for projects already using RTI Connext DDS, but also for those using other middleware or even starting from scratch,” said Charles Cross, Co-founder and CTO at Mission Robotics. “At Mission Robotics, we were able to create a proof of concept from scratch that allowed us to remotely control and monitor a robot over the internet in only three hours. Considering the time and resources that would have gone into this effort otherwise, this is an absolute game changer.”

In addition to its support for complex networking environments, new features in Connext 6.1 facilitate the development of any large-scale and heterogeneous distributed system.

Support for .NET Core 5 lets developers use C# and run their applications on any platform that supports .NET Standard 2.0. In addition to Windows, this includes Linux, macOS and the Unity game engine.
A new System Designer tool provides a graphical way to easily and intuitively specify the configuration and interfaces in a Connext-based system. This helps ensure that applications adhere to a common architecture and can interoperate in a plug-and-play manner.
Administration Console includes enhanced graphical views to make it easier to visualize the components of live large-scale systems and their interconnectivity. This allows OEMs and systems integrators to better observe behavior during test and deployment, and to more quickly identify configuration or network problems.

For more information on Connext 6.1 and a full list of new features, visit: https://www.rti.com/products/connext-6-1. RTI customers can also access additional training on what’s new in Connext 6.1 via RTI Academy.