ROS on ARM

asked 2011-07-25 07:37:57 -0500

pjmartin
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updated 2014-01-28 17:10:06 -0500

ngrennan
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Has anyone tried getting ROS to run on ARM systems, such as Gumstix or Phidget SBCs?

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Check out eros: http://www.ros.org/wiki/eros or rosserial:http://www.ros.org/wiki/rosserial

mmwise ( 2011-07-25 07:39:38 -0500 )edit

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answered 2011-07-25 12:32:23 -0500

adasta
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EROS is a project devoted to enabling easy cross compiling of ROS projects for non-X86 architectures. It assumes that you are running a full Linux distro on your ARM.

rosserial on the other hand allows you to communicate using ros on platforms that do not have a full linux stack. It is meant to send messages over serial to a computer. Our primary platform for rosserial is Arduino which runs on an 8-bit microcontroller.

If you are using a Gumstix Overo or similar platform, you want to use EROS.

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Is EROS able to run navigation stack successfully on full embedded linux now?

sam ( 2011-07-26 01:56:45 -0500 )edit

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answered 2011-08-05 10:41:06 -0500

This post is a wiki. Anyone with karma >75 is welcome to improve it.

I've collected my notes and prepared a tutorial about installing ROS on a Gumstix Overo from -literally- scratch :) Hope, it gives some idea...

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You can safely try avoiding swap. I've had swap turned off on my dev usb pen drive embedded installations for about a year. So long as you're really not pushing your RAM limits, its ok. In fact, on slow drives I'd say your better off managing memory than killing your flash with alot of slow writes.

Daniel Stonier ( 2011-08-05 18:52:42 -0500 )edit

You might want to drop rosout to reduce ram and do less writes (less redundant logging, but a little harder to debug with tools). See http://answers.ros.org/question/1034/roslaunch-without-rosout

Daniel Stonier ( 2011-08-05 18:55:42 -0500 )edit

Snorri, I suppose it heavily depends on your application, particularly the way the memory is used. But I will try to swap off to test the board for various applications to have a more quantitative comparison. I'll check dropping rosout too.. Thanks for the advices...

Kadir Firat Uyanik ( 2011-08-10 06:16:05 -0500 )edit

I completely agree. I'd love to here what your experiences are after some thorough testing.

Daniel Stonier ( 2011-08-10 11:24:28 -0500 )edit

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answered 2011-07-25 23:12:17 -0500

rado0x54
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I have ros running on an iPhone/iPad. Did cross-compilation with rosmake under Mac OS X. Works like a charm. You will have to patch the serialization.h though. At least on these ARM devices there will be a misalignment crash otherwise... See https://code.ros.org/trac/ros/ticket/2883

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Thats interesting, I'd only discovered that problem on a really obscure samsung board. Given iphone/ipad prevalance, we'll have to try and work out a proper way to patch that and get it into the mainstream sometime.

Daniel Stonier ( 2011-07-26 18:22:39 -0500 )edit

Yeah, that would definitely be nice.

rado0x54 ( 2011-07-26 19:48:09 -0500 )edit

How do you cross-compile ros for iOS using rosmake?