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Robotic Submarine Running Debian Wins International Competition (debian-news.net)Robotic Submarine Running Debian Wins International Competition (debian-news.net)Posted Oct 13, 2009 13:14 UTC (Tue) by MegabytePhreak (subscriber, #60945)In reply to: Robotic Submarine Running Debian Wins International Competition (debian-news.net) by ledow Parent article: Robotic Submarine Running Debian Wins International Competition (debian-news.net)
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.
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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.
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