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Robotic Submarine Running Debian Wins International Competition (debian-news.net)
A team of 35 students from Cornell University won the recent Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition with a submarine running Debian. In addition, Debian was used to design the electronics, and various other free software tools were used for image processing and video capture. "The competition takes place in a large acoustic testing pool operated by the US Navy SPAWAR
Systems Center. It calls for entries to pass through a gate, follow a
path, ram a submerged buoy, fire through a square target with small
torpedoes, drop markers into bins containing simulated targets, recover
a PVC target and surface through an octagon shape, all without human
intervention."
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Robotic Submarine Running Debian Wins International Competition (debian-news.net) Posted Oct 12, 2009 17:16 UTC (Mon) by qg6te2 (guest, #52587) [Link] ... pass through a gate, follow a path, ram a submerged buoy, fire through a square target with small torpedoes, drop markers into bins containing simulated targets, recover a PVC target and surface through an octagon shape, all without human interventionIs that all? After designing & implementing this system, what do we do with the rest of the afternoon ? Seriously, that's a seriously nice achievement, which no doubt has been made at least in part possible through the flexibility and expanse of open source tools, leveraged by many smart people working on pattern recognition and computer vision algorithms. The tools and the OS environment may seem blase to a random person off the street, or even people well versed with open source, however it must not be understated that trying to do something like this with closed source software can be, and often is, extremely time and resource consuming -- why reinvent the wheel when one can "stand on the shoulders of giants", so to speak ?
Robotic Submarine Running Debian Wins International Competition (debian-news.net) Posted Oct 13, 2009 10:20 UTC (Tue) by ledow (guest, #11753) [Link]
Maybe it's just me, but I don't think it's that big a deal - student projects have been like this for a few decades now. That's exactly the sort of thing that you get an undergrad to knock up - and they had 35 of them, presumably from different discplines (EE, CS, maybe even a couple of maths guys for some fancy algorithms).
It seems pretty blah to me, but it'd be fun to take part.
And I don't see the Linux angle, either, and certainly not the Debian angle. We're talking single-board computer, so it could just as easily have been VxWorks or similar - all the real action was in the application programming, not the kernel or the libraries. The Debian angle is highly dubious too - what does Debian provide that any other distro doesn't? I'd have started with something much more cut down and basic, maybe used some common libs and maybe started with statically-compiled executables for such a project - it would hardly matter what distro it was running to do so.
I don't even see an Open Source angle, they could have licensed just about any library to do the job (educational use = significant discount + assistance from the authors) but probably found useful libs somewhere that just happened to be OS and used them.
More interesting is that their desktops etc. run Debian as well but to make the sub run Debian too just seems blind loyalty rather than using the best tool for the job. They mention power-saving and all sorts but it seems to me that they could have done as good a job with anything else they could have used. I now wonder about the specs of that SBC - I'm guessing they are actually quite high if it's running off-the-shelf video-processing/capture libs on even a modified distro and categorising this as "embedded" is pushing the definition a lot... it's a PC in a sub.
Robotic Submarine Running Debian Wins International Competition (debian-news.net) Posted Oct 13, 2009 10:26 UTC (Tue) by ledow (guest, #11753) [Link]
"Our on-board computer uses a Commell LS-371 3.5in embedded motherboard with an Intel Core Duo 2.0 GHz processor and 2GB of RAM. We use a Patriot Memory Warp II 32 GB solid state drive (SSD) for on-board storage."
This isn't anything big in the computing stakes - just a PC in a sub, as I suspected. This isn't a marvellous achievement computing-wise - they've programmed a computer-visualisation app (using pygame at some points!) on their desktop and slapped it onto an identically specced SBC inside a sub.
If they've done it on a 100MHz processor with 32Mb RAM or less (with support chips), then it would be much more worthy of them using the word "embedded". As it is, it's just slapping GHz and Gb at the problem.
However, their pages on their vehicles are infinitely more interesting from an algorithm / engineering point of view. The details of PC specification and OS are completely irrelevant - they could have slapped XP on that sub and run the same programs and nobody would have even noticed.
Robotic Submarine Running Debian Wins International Competition (debian-news.net) Posted Oct 13, 2009 13:14 UTC (Tue) by MegabytePhreak (subscriber, #60945) [Link]
Embedded has nothing to do with CPU power. The processors in the Route processors of a modern carrier router are pretty powerful, but it's still an embedded application. I don't see why you feel the need to put down the accomplishment of this team, simply because you feel that unless they do it with a pointlessly pathetic computer setup it's worthless.
As an undergrad student working on a vehicle to compete in the same competition I think if you'd look at the time pressure that teams are usually under you would understand why absolutely minimizing the power consumption of computer systems isn't a top priority. The point of these competitions is to push the absolute limits of what an autonomous sub can do. When you get down too it, while there can be a bunch of innovative ideas involved, a lot it is about just getting some practical, start to finish experience for undergrads.
Robotic Submarine Running Debian Wins International Competition (debian-news.net) Posted Oct 13, 2009 13:51 UTC (Tue) by ledow (guest, #11753) [Link]
I think the project is cool. I think the engineering is marvellous. I think the algorithms used would be the most interesting thing to myself (Mathematician/Computer Scientist). I don't see how/why it's pushed on a Linux site as an example of the use of Linux.
Also "the point of these competitions is to push the absolute limits of what an autonomous sub can do" and they've done that in every area but the computing. I think my usage of the word embedded is about designing a machine for a particular task that stays within a single device - not throwing standardised (but small), vastly overpowered, high-power consumption hardware at a task. It's not *wrong*, but it's not the revolution that it's made to sound.
Those kind of software projects are knocked up on every university CS course every day - I've done them myself - but it's translating them to a real-world system that doesn't involve putting a full PC inside a sub that's the interesting part.
And they push power-saving as being the dominant factor, but that doesn't ring true if they are using off-the-shelf components of that spec and just "brute-forcing" the visualisations (and is it just me or does nowhere publish the wattage of that board?). A Core-2 processor takes a fair amount of power.
And in a competition scenario, that might not be their top priority, but then why mention power in the press release? And in the context that a *particular* open source video processing library gives "significant power savings"? Seems they *were* thinking about the power but still threw a Core2 at it!
35 students spent a lot of time on this. It seems sad that the computing side is more about "WE USED DEBIAN" than actually making something efficient, but it looks like the engineering side have done a fabulous job.
I think the project is good. But I think the computing hardware side is pretty average - the sort of thing anyone would try first as a prototype with a view to replacing it later - although the software itself might be interesting (not the OS used), and the fact that it's pushing Debian seems... wrong and irrelevant. It seems gratuitous mentions of a particular flavour of an OS warrant more recognition than the sub itself, almost.
Robotic Submarine Running Debian Wins International Competition (debian-news.net) Posted Oct 13, 2009 14:00 UTC (Tue) by ledow (guest, #11753) [Link]
Hmm...
Nova uses a "22.2V, 4450 mAh" battery (100Wh-ish if my calculations are correct) and they get 2-4 hours of battery time. By a guestimate, the board mentioned probably consumes about 35W peak. That's a BIG chunk of their operating times, battery weight, etc. being used to just run the electronics there - no wonder a decent optimised library saves them a lot of power. And it appears to sit idle a lot of the time (or else the sub wouldn't have any power to do anything else!).
I think, therefore that the power consumption was a pretty damn big deal in this case, and there was a good argument for sorting out the processing.
Robotic Submarine Running Debian Wins International Competition (debian-news.net) Posted Oct 13, 2009 14:26 UTC (Tue) by MegabytePhreak (subscriber, #60945) [Link] Sorry, I meant to say that the point of these competitions was not to push the absolute limits of autonomous submarine technology. It's great to play around with some neat ideas but in the end, budgets are limited and even more so time is limited. Also, you only used the numbers for a single battery pod in your post, but as far as I can see you used two. You keep talking about efficiency, but for the computing side the standard rules apply. For the most part, programmer time if more valuable than processor time. Using Linux makes the programming environment more accessible for new students with their innovative ideas, as compared to using something like VXworks or QNX.
Robotic Submarine Running Debian Wins International Competition (debian-news.net) Posted Oct 13, 2009 15:49 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Its a competition so that it is, in fact, designed specifically to push
limits.
Budget limits, time limits, experienced limits... You know things you
Robotic Submarine Running Debian Wins International Competition (debian-news.net) Posted Oct 13, 2009 19:08 UTC (Tue) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link]
"Those kind of software projects are knocked up on every university CS course every day - I've done them myself - but it's translating them to a real-world system that doesn't involve putting a full PC inside a sub that's the interesting part."
Err, no. That's the tedious, not-very-interesting part, just putting together brilliant parts to make a workable product.
Robotic Submarine Running Debian Wins International Competition (debian-news.net) Posted Oct 15, 2009 18:32 UTC (Thu) by dmag (subscriber, #17775) [Link]
> This isn't anything big in the computing stakes
> If they've done it on a 100MHz processor with 32Mb RAM or less [..] then it would be much more worthy of them using the word "embedded".
Oh, don't be so down on them.
First, it's a perfectly good use of the word "embedded". http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Aembedded
Second, it wasn't a competition of Linux hackers to see who could make the smallest distro. It was an wide-range assortment of Engineers making an *Autonomous* (as in not radio controlled) sub.
Third, I'd like to see you do real-time image recognition on a video stream with a 100MHz processor. Heck, a 100MHz Pentium had trouble *playing back* postage-stamp sized video as I recall.
Fourth, it was students for crissakes! We can't compare them to a professional of _your_ caliber.
Fifth, I define embedded as "8-bit processor and 2K of RAM". How silly of you to call it "embedded" if it has Megabytes of RAM!
Just the fact that "students" built an autonomous sub is amazing. Likely not even possible 10 years ago (certainly not affordable).
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