[ros-users] Capability of ARM dev board for ROS host

[Steven Martin]

Yeh ARM boards are fine for light stuff with ros but I have found that once you try running anything in python it really can't handle it. What really caused me issues was rosbag as running it and logging simple data. Like maybe 5 topics with a few floats in each @ 20hz would use 100% CPU on the gumstix. (i am using a very old version which might contribute)  

Trying to do any processing of laser data @ 30hz wasn't really possible either. New beagle board is quite a lot more powerful than gumstix so should be fine just don't expect to run a kinect with good performance off it. 

Steve

On 13/01/2012, at 7:30 PM, Kent Williams <k3nt00 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks for the thoughts Arjun,
> 
> At the moment I have the headless ubuntu 11.10 on the beagleboard so no X window. I'll just end up testing how many substantial nodes I can get running nicely, but ultimately it's looking like these are just not suited to be the main workhorse just yet. 
> 
> On Fri, Jan 13, 2012 at 1:03 AM, Arjun Arumbakkam <akarjun at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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 at 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 at gmail.com
> (818)203-4394
> 
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> -- 
> Kent Williams
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