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G. Kudryavtseva

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Feb 17, 2012, 9:13:16 PM2/17/12
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Hello,
What is the best (and preferably cheap) netbook for a ROS-running robot platform?
 
Boris.
 

G. Kudryavtseva

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Feb 17, 2012, 9:23:24 PM2/17/12
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Patrick Goebel

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Feb 19, 2012, 4:18:19 PM2/19/12
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Hi Boris,

I can't tell you what the best netbook (or laptop)  is but I can tell you a minimal setup that works on my ROS robot.  I have a 3-year old Samsung NC10 single-core 1.6Hz Intel Atom N270 netbook with 1 Gb RAM.  This is a fairly low grade configuration by today's standard but I am able to run the full ROS Electric navigation stack on it at the same time as running an OpenCV face detector on the video stream from a Kinect running at QVGA (320x240) resolution.  This netbook cost $400 three years ago and you should be able to get something with at least a dual-core for the same or similar price today.

--patrick

http://www.pirobot.org



On 02/17/2012 06:23 PM, G. Kudryavtseva wrote:
Hello, What is the best (and preferably cheap) netbook for a ROS-running robot platform?
Boris.
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James Nugen

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Feb 19, 2012, 4:35:58 PM2/19/12
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Hi Patrick,

I have a related question. How much disk space is ROS using on your
netbook? I have a netbook with a 8Gbyte SSD, that I'm guessing is too
small. I'm thinking about ordering a larger SSD and am wondering how
big it needs to be.

Thanks,
-James Nugen

Patrick Goebel

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Feb 20, 2012, 9:47:22 AM2/20/12
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Hi James,

I have the full ROS Electric install using Debian packages, plus the
openni and turtlebot packages and the total comes to about 1.6 Gb.

--patrick

Patrick Goebel

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Feb 20, 2012, 10:55:20 AM2/20/12
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Just an additional observation: I 1 tested the navigation stack again using my Samsung NC10 and this time I added the pointcloud from the Kinect to the costmap, but after downsampling to a 10cm voxel grid.  The netbook was still able to handle the load and it really helps obstacle avoidance when it comes to furniture compared to using the laser alone.  BTW, the load meter on the netbook reads around 6.0 during all this so how the heck it keeps up with all the data processing is beyond me...

--patrick

Tim Craig

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Feb 22, 2012, 1:01:25 AM2/22/12
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James,

Another data point. Last night I did a complete install of ROS Electric
on an Intel laptop under Ubuntu 11.04. If I read the disk free space
right, it took 3.5 GB.

Tim

James Nugen

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Feb 22, 2012, 3:07:28 AM2/22/12
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Thanks Tim and Patrick!

I went ahead and installed Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS and ROS Electric on my
netbook this weekend. As you pointed out, there was plenty of space
on the 8GB SSD!

-James

G. Kudryavtseva

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Feb 22, 2012, 10:13:13 PM2/22/12
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Thanks, everyone!
My dad and I got a Asus 1011XP with a Dual-Core Intel Atom 570 (1.66Ghz), and 320GB HDD.
And, James, is the netbook/laptop are you talking about (with 8GB SSD), a Asus X101?

~Boris
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