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Linux Hits the Road

Posted by michael on from the roadkill dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Vicroads does regular surveys of the roads in Victoria, Australia, to determine where they need to be patched or otherwise repaired. It used to be done in a vehicle travelling at 20 kph: slow, tedious, and hazardous to the traffic around it. Now, thanks to Linux, it's being done at speeds of 80 to 100 kph. The Melbourne Age has the details. Short version: the cost has fallen from $1.2 million Australian to $850,000. Not bad..."

4 of 207 comments (clear)

  1. Multiple FireWire cameras under Linux? by Animats · · Score: 5, Informative
    I'm amazed they got that to work. The FireWire hot-plugging support in Linux is a mess, doesn't handle the hard cases, and needs a complete redesign. Camera support is ugly, with a wierd interface between the application and the driver.

    (I wrote FireWire camera support for QNX, and looked at the Linux code to see how to do some things. It didn't help much.)

    (Windows support for FireWire is painful in a different way. It's incredibly complex, and has far too much kernel code, to allow for DRM. And the Video for Windows retrofit for FireWire is flakey.)

  2. CSIRO did it first... by quinkin · · Score: 4, Informative
    The CSIRO system that I assume this is built on top of/based upon has been receiving awards since 1998.

    See here for details.

    Q.

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  3. Re:Linux not the answer by pc486 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Well, the project manager Viner thought that the project would be based on Windows but after talking to Dr. Tim Ferguson, Viner let Ferguson base it on Linux. Viner was so impressed with the way that Linux preformed the video capture and monitoring that "The experience has made Viner a firm Linux convert. 'The office is moving over to Linux and we are looking at getting some form of network-attached storage for our clients,' he said."

    And Ferguson said it best at the end of the article: "Development using open source software means the developer is totally in charge. You can do what you like, and customise things to your own needs. There are downsides, like the problems I faced with the firewire drivers. But then you'll generally find that you are not alone in this; there will be others to contribute little bits of knowledge until the jigsaw is complete."

    So to say that Linux is "incidental" is a little bit of an understatment.

  4. The state next door did this already... by B747SP · · Score: 4, Informative
    The Australian CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Org.) got together with the NSW RTA (New South Wales (the state just north of Victoria, where this story's system came from) Roads and Traffic Authority) already hopped into bed together to come up with what sounds like, by all accounts, a technically better system...

    The CSIRO's RoadCrack system is designed to find cracks in the pavement as small as 1mm wide, at 'highway speeds' of up to 105Km/h (65Mph).

    The link doesn't say when this one was built, but it won awards in 1999, and was 'upgraded' in 2001.

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