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Quadcopter Drone Packs First All-Linux Autopilot
DeviceGuru writes: Erle Robotics has launched what is claimed to be the first drone to run both a Pixhawk APM autopilot and ROS directly on Linux. Over the last year Erle Robotics and 3DRobotics have collaborated on developing an open source, all-Linux BeagleBone Black-based autopilot for drones using the popular 3DR APM architecture, but without using Nuttx RTOS for the real-time bits. In addition to being used on a new 'Erle-copter' quadcopter drone, the new all-Linux 'Erle-brain' APM will ship in both a two-winged UAV and a four-wheeled robotic vehicle, due next spring.
If a drone running Linux causes a crash of a passenger plane the whole world around newspapers would carry " Linux crashes an air disaster " as their headlines
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Found it. For anyone else interested: https://github.com/erlerobot
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
The Linux OS is not running the flight controller, it has a flight controller (Arduino-based) plugged into it. Seriously, who approves this nonsense?
The flight controller is running under linux. It is just a standard linux process.
From what I've seen (crawing throught he source tree), the fire cape basically provides lots of sensors running on SPI (and maybe I2C), bus protection/voltage conversion for lots of UARTS, PWM,etc as well as maybe voltage regulators. The only part of this that is sort handled out of under linux is the use of the BBB's PRUs to handle some of the extra PWM requirements in software since the BBB doesn't really have enough in hardware for most projects and linux can't do the hard real time reliably enough to keep servos free of jitter using GPIOs.
The project is using the APM hardware abstraction layer which makes porting to different architectures "relatively" easy. APM was originally written for the Arduino but has moved on since then.
I am sorry Dave, I cannot open the door because there is a driver issue with the device.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
[For some reason, I'm hearing Flight of the Valkyries right now...]
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.