Development boards to use with ROS

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I have a similar project to use on-board computer vision for obstacle avoidance. I did a little research on what development platforms where suitable for that and I finally bought a Cubieboard 2. It is powerful and cheap, but if you need connectivity you may preffer the cubieboard 3 (named truck).

Note that for quadrotor/UAV use, commonly a microcontroller system is used to perform low level control/stabilization (sending out PWM/motor commands under hard real-time constraints), while a board like the ODROID might additionally be used for additional higher level computation (image processing etc.). It is possible in principle to do it all on the computer board, but that will likely require using a hard real-time Linux variant and significant effort both in terms of hard- and software development. If you search for "odroid autopilot" you´ll find mostly examples of the above mentioned separation of microcontroller-based dedicated autopilot and the ODROID used additionally.

I'm contemplating building a new controller board for this purpose, to integrate with my java based autonomous robot controller. Nothing I've found available off the shelf has low enough latency response times, power usage, and high enough system resources to handle hundreds of simultaneous ros topics/services and equal numbers of high speed low latency hardware connections.

ahendrix, you wrote: "I also know at least one group that is successfully running ROS on the Radxa Rock board, and it seems like a pretty solid board."

I recently have purchased a Rock and would like to know more about this group. If they have a website or something, can you please either post or PM me.

Thanks!

I had a similar project which used an on-board embedded system.

The board we choose is Odroid XU (similar to the Odroid U3 @ahendrix mentioned but much more powerful) We install the Ubuntu 13.04 to support the Ubuntu-ARM ROS, the kernel is downloaded form the forum of Odroid.

It works perfectly, we use its serial port to communicate with another board which has GPIO/PWM pins also with an IMU. There are also some usb ports on XU that allow us use usb-port device.

One more suggestion is the GALILEO from Intel.

The GALILEO has its own ROS wiki page, so I think that should also be a good choice.