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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
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.
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
I think this NASA project is more of a hobby, did you see the K10? It looks like a microwave with tractor wheels. When you're building a proof-of-concept sometimes a couple hundred can put you over budget.
I know you're just trying to be funny (please don't, it doesn't suit you), but in all reality, they wouldn't use Windows for that anyway. Probably a commercial RTOS.
No matter where you go... there you are.
install Mac OS X?
I doubt NASA would never use Windows anything for an actual mission, and that's not a money issue.
The cost savings probably coem from the fact that, with Linux, they have an operating system that they can fully customize to their specific needs (thus Windows would not be an option). Traditionally all of their mission software was 100% home-rolled. I suspect the reduced manpower to build the software is where the savings come in.
=Smidge=
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
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!
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.
They're robots! They should be able to drive themselves! Oh wait... ;)
FTA:
The K-10 runs Red Hat Linux, which NASA says was chosen for its large user base and application compatibility. Additionally, NASA notes that, "Linux's flexibility and scalability enable us to easily add, remove, and extend devices with minimal difficulty."
That'll teach me to read the damn article first next time.
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
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?
Besides using Linux, they also use off the shelf parts (like USB and Firewire within the robot to connect various parts to the computer). I assume that otherwise, they wouldn't use Windows, but would rather use custom-designed hardware and OS, which would certainly cost more.
This is a sig. It is appended to the end of comments I post.
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
Actually, NASA has a pretty big focus on more smaller cheaper and much cheaper probes, etc., so, yeah, a license for a commercial OS for each might make a difference. Though cutting costs doesn't just mean cutting licensing costs. The open source nature of Linux may make it easier for NASA to customize to their rather specialized application, whereas getting either similar source code rights to Windows or getting Microsoft to build them a customized version would have a substantial additional cost above the license cost.
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 .
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
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?
For a lunar rover, it has to be Lunatix.
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.
Quick, turn on NASA TV right now, or go stream it from somewhere!
Check out the laptops on the station and shuttle. See that desktop? Windows. Every one of them I believe.
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 :)
They actually use VxWorks for several spacecraft, I don't know what they use for the rovers though.
There does seem to be a trend in NASA though to try moving away from commercial/proprietary products across the board. I have seen them using Fedora and other shades of Linux on their testbeds for simulation, and I have heard talk of them looking into RTOS versions of Linux for the future.
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
Somehow I doubt the laptops are responsible for anything on the mission beyond multimedia applications and the crew's personal use. Not exactly what would be considered "mission software".
The shuttle itself uses a bunch of 32bit AP-101 systems, which I doubt would be running Windows even if they were capable.
=Smidge=
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!
I know in the water reclamation lab they had vxworks on several boards, but now in an air lab project they are using linux (eldk for the mips405 pc/104 board, and I used fedora core 5 for a dev server/nfs for the mips405).
I really, really doubt that the licence cost is an issue when talking about millions of dollars (even for those low-cost missions). Instead, the real advantage in using linux for robotics (IMO) is the network transparency. Remote access is no issue with Linux (or any other unixish OS for that matter). It has lots of network protocols too (AX25 comes to mind).
..."
One issue might be the code size. Remember that the Mars Exploration Rovers had multiple software upgrades sent over during the mission. An embedded RTOS is usually smaller in size, so that's a real time saver. But then again, with linux you could simply include gcc in the rover, send over the diff's, and let the rover compile the flight software in situ, and compare the output with md5. That would be a first! And you could simply interrupt the make process if the power runs low, and restart later. A standard make will find out where it was and continue from there, right out of the box.
PS: One more reason not to use windoze: just imagine getting a message from the other side of the solar system saying "Your version of windows is not genuine. Please contact
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Traditionally all of their mission software was 100% home-rolled.
This is untrue - Spirit and Opportunity run VxWorks.
It would be interested to see any modifications NASA come out with for Linux (although since they aren't distributing the software they don't technically need to release the source). I understand they use a modified IP stack for communicating with recent probes, etc. so that's all stuff that could be published.
I suspect the reduced manpower to build the software is where the savings come in.
There could be stability bonuses too - even though noone else is using Linux for this job, the fact that large chunks of the code have been in use by a large number of people for years may be a big benefit - there's only so far that testing in the lab will go. (That is not to say they will reduce the testing they do, but starting with a code base that's well proved already is always a good thing on top of your normal test procedures)
http://blog.nexusuk.org
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
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
Once that Thinkpad is on the Moon, I bet the cooling fan will have to run really really really fast!
Somehow I doubt the laptops are responsible for anything on the mission beyond multimedia applications and the crew's personal use.
Basically yes - they are used for "non critical" applications (meaning nobody gets killed if the box goes belly up). They are used for a little more than just personal use - for example, the windows machines on ISS are used for the crew to reference flight procedures. Timelines are sent to them over the Windows machines. All the high resolution photos taken of the orbiter with a digital camera for thermal protection system evaluation are transferred to Windows machines and downlinked.
All the core software on the orbiter and ISS (the stuff that runs pumps, flies the vehicle, whatever) is all custom software (written by IBM/Rockwell/USA for the orbiter, Boeing on ISS) running on cusom hardware. The laptops used by the ISS crew to command the vehicle use a modified version of RedHat on IBM A31p laptops.
Worst...sig...ever!
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.