Increasingly, microcontrollers are being used in industrial systems to handle sophisticated control and monitoring activities. As applications become more sophisticated, their design and development becomes complex, necessitating the use of an operating system to manage the complexity and provide an abstraction for improving portability of code.

This web site presents PICOS18, an operating system based on OSEK/VDX, an open industry standard. The OSEK standard is well suited for the low computing, power, small memory embedded controllers used in automotive or robotique applications.

PICOS18 designed by Pragmatec Inc. is an operating system for the PICmicro microcontrollers from the Microchip PIC18 family. It is totaly free and is distributed under the GPL licence.