Quadcopter Drone Packs First All-Linux Autopilot 31
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.
Many hobby drones already run on Linux (Score:2)
Many drone auto-pilots already run on embedded Linux.
The AR Drone 2.0 (which is quite old already) runs on Linux 2.6.32 for instance.
Misleading (Score:2)
The Linux OS is not running the flight controller, it has a flight controller (Arduino-based) plugged into it. Seriously, who approves this nonsense?
When that thing causes an air disaster ... (Score:2)
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
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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
More than likely the plane will go down and no one will be able to identify the drone or the pilot much less care what controller it had and if it ran Linux or not.
Mislead (Score:2)
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
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Wrong wrong wrong. Distinction between hard and soft realtime is not the minimum latency, it's about guaranteeing the latency. Linux provides no such guarantee and is inappropriate for the job.
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Maybe so, but they are selling it with claims that more powerful linux board may be used to additional things like robotic vision while running autpilot at the same time/
Clarifying quotation (Score:2)
And why would I care? (Score:2)
There are several other open source projects out there for autopilot and flight control. Why should I care that this runs Linux? What benefits does Linux bring to the table?
From what I can tell from TFA the only feature this brings to the table is that it's slow enough to require an entire ARM based board instead of the dirt cheap AVRs that are from what I can tell equally capable on the software level and are used in other platforms.
Is this just Linux for Linux sake?
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From what I can tell from TFA
You needed to dig down one more link from TFA, and read TFA linked from TFA, which says "(Incidentally, the acronym âoeAPMâ comes from âoeArduPilot Mega. âoeIt was originally based on the Arduino Mega, back in the day, and the initials stuck,â wrote 3D Robotics CEO Chris Anderson in an email to LinuxGizmos.)" That puts (from TFA, not TFA^2) "3DRâ(TM)s popular, Arduino-based APM (ArduPilot Mega) platform" in a different light.
Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get any good pi
Source code? (Score:2)
It runs Linux, but is the controller code open source? I couldn't find any links to the source code and without it, whether it runs Linux or something else becomes irrelevant. If anyone finds the link, please share it.
Re:Source code? (Score:4, Informative)
Found it. For anyone else interested: https://github.com/erlerobot [github.com]
What flavor of Linux (Score:2)
And does it use systemd?
Linux Odyssey 2001 (Score:3)
Obligatory (Score:3)
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
[For some reason, I'm hearing Flight of the Valkyries right now...]
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The latter. Thanks for the improvement.