Hi Kent,
It depends on what linux distribution you are using on your board. If you
use a full fledged Ubuntu distribution, your processor and memory is going
to be loaded and there will be little room for other processes.
That said, if you use a lightweight Ubuntu distribution such as Lxde with
Lxdm, you could have room for more computation. We've used a Gumstix Overo
board with lxde and lxdm to run a roscore, olsr with two wifi interfaces
and a rosnode (with minor computation) and still found the X interface
quite responsive. It could have handled some image processing as well, but
we ran localization, planning, control and image processing nodes offboard
on a beefy laptop like Damon suggested in his email. The Gumstix Overo uses
an ARM Cortex A8 core with 512 MB, same as the beagleboard. You could go
one up by using just a console image without X. That might give you more
room for image processing, etc.
-Arjun.


On Fri, Jan 13, 2012 at 3:38 AM, Kent Williams <k3nt00@gmail.com> wrote:

> It is our hope to make the robot a standalone unit, and therefore not
> require any off board infrastructure. I know this is quite a vague
> question, I'm really just looking to see if anyone has hit the wall big
> time with the capabilities of these boards or if there is hope for leaning
> them down enough and slowing down the update frequencies to get by.  I have
> been considering to attempt to use a decent android phone I have as the
> image  sensor and processing resource node using rosjava, since the vision
> requirements are low. Then possibly the beagleboard or pandaboard would be
> sufficient for hosting the rest.
>
>
> --
> Kent Williams
>
> k3nt00@gmail.com
> (818)203-4394
>
> _______________________________________________
> ros-users mailing list
> ros-users@code.ros.org
> https://code.ros.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-users
>
>