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.
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