Real time robot control on Linux

[Dejan Pangercic]

Hello everyone, 

I am looking for some pointers from those that run your robots on Linux in real time. I'd really appreciate if you could tell me:

- which robot/use case do you have

- which HW architecture are you using (e.g. arm vs x86)

- which Linux distro

- which real time kernel (e.g. xenoami vs rt_preempt)

- which scheduler

- which peripherals (e.g. CAN, Ethercat, serial, etc.)

- which application framework (e.g. written from scratch, ROS, Orocos, )

Thanks upfront, D.

[Víctor MV]

Hey Dejan,

We do run our robots based in Linux. There it goes:

• Available are copters, rovers and planes but we have also built some other vehicles based on the same brain.
• ARM
• Ubuntu Snappy Core mainly
• RT_PREEMPT although we found that in many scenarios the simple PREEMPT option of the kernel actually performs pretty good.
• SCHED_FIFO
  
• SPI, I2C, Ethernet (we expect to use CAN soon)
• Several of our vehicles are using APM bridged to ROS (through mavros) but we have really promising internal prototypes of everything based in ROS.

Regards,