Simplifying Cross-Platform Development for Embedded Systems

Developing applications for multiple platforms or for embedded systems can pose a challenge for software engineers. This typically means that the application can't easily be developed and run in the same environment where it will be deployed.

One way to address this is to develop your application using a virtual machine environment, like JAVA, but this introduces its own complications and overhead to run-time requirements.

Kongsberg Geospatial’s TerraLens SDK was developed to help address this challenge by providing compiled libraries and tools to allow applications to be natively compiled for a wide range of hardware and operating systems, so engineers can easily run and test the application on their development computer before deploying to any of several supported platforms or embedded systems.

The SDK is a highly efficient graphical toolkit designed to be performant on a wide variety of hardware ranging from low-powered RISC ARM processors to state-of-the-art computers with powerful GPUs. Because defense applications often have to run in constrained environments, the TerraLens product team have invested significant effort in optimizing performance for low-power computing environments. The toolkit has been successfully ported and implemented for VxWorks and Linux-based embedded systems.

TerraLens can render map data from a wide variety of sources in a very efficient manner. Most commonly available map formats can be visualized quickly with a minimum of developer effort.

Utilizing a consistent toolkit interface across all platforms allows developers to create applications on desktop computers that can be ported to embedded applications with relative ease. This allows the operation and validation of maps and track information in a desktop environment before porting the program to an embedded application, reducing development effort and costs.