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NASA Testing Linux-Based Exploration Robots
SeenOnSlash.com writes "This week NASA is testing a Linux-based lunar rover called K-10 in the Arizona desert. To cut costs and promote maintainability the K-10 runs Linux and uses commercial off-the-shelf parts where possible. The robot rover's control and communications system is based on an IBM Thinkpad X31 and attaches to subsystems with standard PC interfaces. Real-time tasks such as fine-grained motor control are offloaded to a distributed network of microcontroller-powered control boards. Maneuvers can be watched through a live webcam."
Does it include a copy of the GPL? Aliens need to know that they are entitled to the source code if they find the probe.
To boldly go where no penguin has gone before...
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.- Douglas Adams
What, a couple hundred bucks for a copy of Windows put the project over budget? Off-the-shelf parts, sure, but don't phrase the entry to imply that the no-cost characteristics of linux were an important factor.
The use of Linux and commercial grade gear for the space program is really quite cool stuff. It makes me think that a really cool contest for NASA would be to have grad students desgn and build a rover/probe and the winner (once vetted by NASA) is actually launched into space. It is probably cost prohibitive but it would be very cool if it happened. It may be a way to break NASA groupthink, and re0invigorate designs with some fresh minds. Not that I'm critisizing NASAs robotics programs, the Mars rovers are a smashing success.
Good luck finding Linux drivers for this thing.
welcome our Linux Robot overlords.
But does it run li... oh.
Why is it that many people who claim to support standards have such atrocious spelling and grammar?
But, does it run Windows?
Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
Longtime Slashdot user makes "rookie mistake" of clicking a webcam link on a recently posted Slashdot article
and the link was NOT SLASHDOTTED!!!
some things are too strange to be believed....I don't know if life even makes sense now...
A goal is a dream with a deadline
I thought red-hat was commercial. I'm glad they are using linux but I always thought that Red-Hat wasnt free. Wouldnt debian or FreeBSD or something else be more "off the shelf" and wouldnt it also saved them some doh?
Leave it to the government to spend extra money where they dont need too.
Are you...Are you some kind of genius?
No, ma'am, I'm just a regular Slashdot reader.
Will SCO go to Mars to support their IP rights?
A goal is a dream with a deadline
install Mac OS X?
I was always under the impression that any probes/landers had to use "rad-hardened" processors to deal with the solar radiation in space. Is this less of a concern for rovers and the like since they could be adequately shielded until entering the atmosphere of another planet/moon? Meanwhile, get a load of the wacky space Centaur!: http://www.linuxdevices.com/files/misc/nasa_drats_ centaur.jpg
Why don't they just use a MALP?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
So Kawaii!!!
At last, I'm on the same level as NASA for computing power, x31 users around the world can now claim their laptops are space-age technology. Kick ass!
It would be interesting to see which distro NASA picked, and for what reasons. Guesses anyone?
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
Once again, Linux proves itself as the OS of choice whenever you couldn't care less about the OS.
The robots are driven by custom robot-specific software that has nothing to do with the OS underneath. The main reason Linux gets used in such an application (or in supercomputers, clusters, etc) is simply that the OS doesn't matter enough for anyone to bother, so they'll grab the nearest thing on the shelf.
It's not like there's some feature of the OS that makes it especially robot-friendly.
You know the MSFT marketing department on the case, what other explaination is there for their 2003 HPC (sic) edition?
In other news, Richard Stallman slammed NASA for using GPL code, but not allowing everyone to pilot the robot or go on space mission.
In a statement released today, NASA has responded by offering to send Stallman to Mars.
Have you read my journal today?
Must be K9's bigger brother (Robot dog from Dr. Who)
Is NASA testing these off-the-shelf components for use in a vaccuum? Under intense radiation? Under extreme heat differentials? In the presence of moon dust?
Are they checking to make sure each component actually meets all the specifications, or are they relying on the industry's statistics that most of the boards meet most of the specs most of the time?
If something breaks, who is paying for the support call? How will parts be replaced on site?
@HbFyo0$k8 tH!$
it's not the desktop!
You have tried to support your argument with faulty reasoning! Go directly to jail; do not pass Go, do not collect $200!
NASA is so pitifully underbudgeted that none of these machines were Vista-ready anyway.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
I am not sure if the Thinkpad will be supported by IBM in space. It may void the warranty.
I am sure I would be glad to see Linux get "out" more. Its easily customized and can be made to run on damed near anything so I am sure it would work quite well. By using Linux I am sure they can save a bundle on licenses to development software in the short term. However, I am unsure about the rest (the bit the reviewer stated, on this really saving cost in the long run).
I always thought that much of the real cost of a "space" probe (besides getting actually it there) was the space hardened chips and tech. Not so much the software. As far as I know NASA dose not have to "pay" to use patents and such. but making this gear on such limited exotic fab specs is crazy expensive.
Using of the shelf gear for the test devices is nice and but those IC will not take hard radiation gracefully. So wont these devices have to be rebuilt from the ground up if there were to actually be used. This of course would be come with significant software re-writes since much of this of the shelf gear would be too costly to space harden, when simply making a simple cheap new implementation would do better. This of course would defeat many or all off the self harware "cost" arguments.
Compared to the huge cost of making space probes in man hours and technology I really dbout software cost has much impact on the total cost of a probe. Instead, I would prefer them to use Linux because it may well be the "best" software to use in such probes.
Namely: it can be dismantled, optimized and modified to your heart's content. Which is a lot, when every millimeter of length and every gram of mass has to be accounted for.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
If the thing has wifi, I've gotta find me a giant pringles can .
Maneuvers can be watched through a live webcam.
Wrong! Like every other Webcam on this world this webcam is also a fake, or not functioning, or whatever.
But ~24h delay isn't live.
Learn reading digital watches Zonk!!!
I volunteer!
NASA also tried out using Vista in their rover, however after waiting a considerable amount of time for the rover to respond to their action (due to the relay distance of the signal), Rover-control was greeted with a dialog stating "This action may leave the system vulnerable, are you sure you want to continue?". In the mean time the rover was buried in a sandstorm.
Is NASA testing these off-the-shelf components for use in a vaccuum? Under intense radiation? Under extreme heat differentials? In the presence of moon dust?
My guess is they're still working on getting the acpi driver to work on the Thinkpad. After that, they'll work on turning off the backlight. The vacuum/intense radiation stuff is next.
What were they running before?
*fear*
Anything can, could, and will happen.
Application "Safely Land Vehicle on Mars" is not responding; Would you like to?
1) click "WAIT" to see if application responds before impact with planet's surface
2) click "FORCE QUIT" to stop application "Warning, you may lose some data"
3) Hit CNTRL-ALT-DEL frantically about 40 times followed by holding the power switch down until computer finally shuts down then restart. System should reboot after mandatory check of hard drive allowing you to try the application again.
4) start MS Word to quickly compose last will and testament?
A goal is a dream with a deadline
I wonder how much money went into government research programs with the objective of figuring out if they could save money by switching to a Linux based robot with off the shelf parts. I'm going to take a wild guess and say it was a lot of money.
NASA have had problems in the past on mars with priority inversion, something that can be helped along by adding priority inheritance code to the underlying kernel, something that Linus has in the past disagreed with ("fix your code instead").
Is there now priority inheritance in the linux kernel, or will NASA have to add it? Will they remember to (this is NASA)? Will the example of a mission to mars going wrong and needing patching add any weight to the pro-priority-inheritance argument?
Will be interesting to see if NASA feed any patches back.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
I'm curious what the power use/battery impact is of having all those hubs and multiplexers and ethernet bridge things, instead of just a computer with lots of I/O ports. Anyone worked on this kind of thing before?
I worked this summer at NASA Ames on an internship, particularly designing a control/power system for an arm thats to be mounted on K-10. The reason they used Red Hat Linux is because it is the system they use throughout the Ames base on the regular linux desktop machines, and it probably allows them to consolidate some maintenance without dealing with multiple distros. Also, its not designed to be space-ready, its basically a test bed for developing software and effective techniques for operation, that would be later translated to space ready rovers. In response to other comments: yes, there is an older version called K-9, which is actuall more designed to look space ready although K-10 is far more useful as a test bed. Additionally, in the coming months there is a new version K-11 being developed.
It should be clear that these aren't NASA engineers designing spacecraft, these are researchers (both NASA and university) doing experiments. They use Linux for the libraries, tools, and as a generally powerful and well-known development environment.
The days of NASA designing their own systems from scratch using proprietary stuff should be just about over. While in days of yore, there really wasn't much in the way of "off the shelf" parts, and NASA (had to/ could get a way with) large R&D budgets for designing tech gear, at this point its better they focused their thing (exploration/safer rockets/advanced propulsion) and let the tech community do the computer hardware/software design. Its a function of ROI- Apple/MS/Intel/IBM/Moto/Linux etc. have spent billions, and more importantly, thousands of man hours perfecting stuff- I would rather NASA spent its man hours doing user applications, device drivers, etc., than designing a new computing platform whose relative youth could cause a mishap. That simple user app from Linux's view point, protected from doing harm to the OS or itself by micro kernels, memory protection, etc., might actually be a rover AI. That simple device driver might be a USB rover mandible. Its all about fighting the common foe of all engineers : Complexity. There is enough of that in NASA's domain to keep them busy for a long time :)
Does anyone know what OS they were using before? I expect they may have been rolling their own rather than using a competing OS. If so, the big news here is:
a) that they're using an "off the shelf OS" (as well as off the shelf hardware)
and then
b) that the OS in question is Linux.
I scanned TFA but saw no mention of what OS (if any) they used before.
Still cool though!
I love my job.
ATHLETE is one of the coolest damn things I've seen in a long time, designed and built by a team of absolutely brilliant engineers. Think of a two-meter-tall six-legged metal spider on roller skates. Or, heck, just check the link above.
The current ATHLETE is a prototype (of course); the ones we send to the moon -- if we're selected -- will be twice that size. Yes, Slashdotters, welcome our four-meter-tall six-legged roller-skate-wearing metal spider overlords!
For additional coverage of K-10, ATHLETE, Centaur/Robonaut, and other vehicles participating in this test, check out the updates from JSC.
``Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.'' -- Richard Dawkins
I thought the US administration had announced that Lenovo kit was off limits. I suppose this means that the policy exists only for new projects (reasonably enough or, more accurately, less unreasonable since I thought the policy was pretty silly anyway).
I guess this means Linux has finally Jumped the Shark?
I think it is pretty much a universally accepted fact making something "In Space" is pretty much an undeniable jump the shark moment.
More robots are linux based.
A robot is a set of custom communicating processes and threads, with sensor and motor drivers.
What other OS has the level of control needed to get this done, while having a large user base?
Robo-Blogs of the world: UNITE!
A lot (read >50%) of NASA ground/mission control software is actually written by Raytheon, using the configurable Java based MCS system called Eclipse (no relation to the IDE) which, wait for it... runs on Win2k.
It just need a Brain in a jar and some vulcan cannons to be a Spider-Mind!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
... luckily Linux is great for running toasters, so it can keep itself all cozy and warm!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Hory Hedgehog in SPACE!!!!
IF martions get linux then they will infolterte are computers and attack earth repent the end is near
Do the robots fight over vi vs. emacs? KDE vs. Gnome? Redhat vs. SuSE vs. Debian vs. Slackware vs. Ubuntu?
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Are those cooling fans on K10?!
Lies about crimes
I read what the AC said in reply to your post, and frankly, he is right. Was this a bad stab at FP or something? Your sense of humor is kinda, well, lacking.
:)
No offense!
Once that Thinkpad is on the Moon, I bet the cooling fan will have to run really really really fast!
Have you guys at Slashdot been reading my blog? We broke this story out yesterday. http://www.electrogeek.com/blog/2006/09/14/nasa-lu nar-robot-runs-red-hat-linux/
We just finished packing up the K10's (we have more than one) and will be heading back to California tomorrow. I'll see if I can post pictures soon.
As one of the primary designers of K10's avionics, I can authoritatively answer questions!
1.) K10 and the other robots that were out in the desert are research platforms and are not intended to fly in space. As such, we can get away with many things including the use of commercially available non-space qualified parts.
2.) Our entire group at NASA Ames primarily runs on Linux (desktops and robots)! We also have a good Mac contingent as well.
3.) K9, it's predecessor, was designed for research in autonomous exploration/science on Mars. Yes, it was named after K-9 in Dr. Who.
For more information on the avionics inside K9 and K10, see:
http://ic.arc.nasa.gov/publications/pdf/0851.pdf
And just like ST:TOS, another split infinitive:
To go boldly where no penguin has gone before.
But I have a good question:
Q: Why isn't it running Windows?
A: It would only be available [at most] six days a week.
(Remember Patch Tuesday? I can only imagine the number of fixes required for the Interplanetary Edition of Windows XP.)
Especially the X31. The only thing I have trouble with on it with Linux is the wireless. I am still at an old 2.6.7 kernel because of that. Should invest the time to upgrade in th near future.
Other than that this machine is perfectly capable of running complex stuff. And at slowest speed (600MHz), it consumes about 9W with the display on darkest and wireless off. Well suited for the job, I would think.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
. a low cost lunar rover is IDEAL for my proposal of VME - Vision for Moonrovers Exploration explained here: http://www.gaetanomarano.it/moonrovers/moonrovers. html/
about the Orion:
I think that a (small SM, TEI-only) Orion is like a (single purpose) "CorkScrew", while, a (big SM, multi purpose) Orion may be the "SwissKnife" of space exploration since it can perform autonomous (manned and unmanned) missions also without the LSAM.
I explain my opinion in details (with a curious image and a list of TEN advantages of the bigSM Orion) in my latest article [ "CorkScrew Orion or SwissKnife Orion?" ] here: http://www.gaetanomarano.it/articles/014swissCEV.h tml/
.
http://www.ghostnasa.com/ http://www.gaetanomarano.it/articles/articles.htm