A real-time extension to the Android platform

Abstract

Android belongs to the leading operating systems for mobile devices, e.g. smartphones or tablets. The availability of Android's source code under general public license allows interesting developments and useful modifications of the platform for third parties, like the integration of real-time support. This paper presents an extension of Android improving its real-time capabilities, without loss of original Android functionality and compatibility to existing applications. In our approach we apply the RT_PREEMPT patch to the Linux kernel, modify essential Android components like the Dalvik virtual machine and introduce a new real-time interface for Android developers. The resulting Android system supports applications with real-time requirements, which can be implemented in the same way as non-real-time applications.

Development and execution of PLC programs on real-time capable mobile devices

“…Predictability for the long-time behavior of the particular process cannot be achieved, as the program execution flow can be interrupted at any time. For this reason, our implementation relies on RTAndroid -a derivative of Android with support for applications with realtime requirements [1].…”

“…RTAndroid reduces maximal scheduling latencies for active real-time applications from several seconds to a few milliseconds [1]. The approach uses the RT_PREEMPT 1 patch to equip Android's Linux kernel with basic support for priority-based, real-time capable process scheduling.…”

“…This paper explores the suitability of tablet computers for control purposes. We present a solution for writing and executing PLC programs on a tablet running RTAndroid, a real-time capable derivative of the Android platform [1]. We designed an integrated development environment (IDE) to conveniently create, modify and navigate through PLC programs.…”

RTDroid

“…Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org. Since its inception, there has been much interest in a realtime Android variant; researchers have proposed four canonical system architectures [15,17] for extending Android with real-time capabilities. These architectural models are illustrated in Fig.…”

Non-blocking garbage collection for real-time Android

“…Due to its usability and rich set of functionalities, Android is an attractive platform for both, developers and end-users. RTAndroid is a modified version of the Android 2.2 platform extended with a real-time capable scheduler [11]. This modification aims to enable the domain of industrial applications.…”