Slashdot Mirror
Robot Operating System To Officially Support ARM Processors
DeviceGuru writes: The Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF), which maintains the open source Robot Operating System (ROS), has announced its first formal support for an ARM target. The organization will add support for the Qualcomm Snapdragon 600, a smartphone-oriented, quad-core, Cortex-A15-like system-on-chip running up to 1.7GHz. The Linux version of ROS for Snapdragon 600 will be available in Q4 of this year, with the Android version due in the first half of 2015. The OSRF will test, refine, and fully integrate support for the ARM instruction set architecture into ROS development efforts. OSRF will also perform ongoing maintenance to support ROS on the Snapdragon 600.
Many robots have arms - the OS needs to be able to control their processes.
#DeleteChrome
Android is Java. Although ROS supports multiple language bindings the core is written in cpp.
Google has a rosjava port. Multiple machines can run in a single ROS system, so the rosjava port is usually used to create Android UI applications to control or view information in a multi-machine ROS system.
ROS development is tied very closely to Ubuntu. Some things work on Mac OSX, but that's because it's Unix based and the built system was easier to adapt. Windows support is practically non-existent because to build system is not well-suited for non-unix systems. You would have an easier time getting rosjava to work.
Really the reason ARM is supported easily is because it's simply a recompilation. Most of the Ubuntu packages that are required are already available for ARM. Full Android support is significantly more difficult.
Heres the thing about R/T robotic control systems in industrial robotics. The tasks that they run are well defined repetitive tasks that don't change much. The kinds of robotics that we see in Hollywood block busters require significant more intelligence and perception that require a little looser definition of real-time computing.
What you're talking about is hard real-time requirements. This means that if we miss some timing we have a total systems failure. ROS does not guarantee timing, so you'll have to come up with a different way to handle these. One solution is to have specialized, verifiable hardware the handles those hard real-time requirements. Usually these are things that prevent the robot from damaging itself, property or others.
There are many applications of robotics that have firm or soft real-time requirements. These are real-time tasks that can be handled by ROS. Robotic perception is something that doesn't really fit into the hard real-time requirement, so we have to think about ways that these systems degrade and fail gracefully when deadlines are missed.