Attention: Answers.ros.org is deprecated as of August the 11th, 2023. Please visit robotics.stackexchange.com to ask a new question. This site will remain online in read-only mode during the transition and into the foreseeable future. Selected questions and answers have been migrated, and redirects have been put in place to direct users to the corresponding questions on Robotics Stack Exchange. Additional details are available here.

Using navigation stack with outdated on-board PC

asked 2013-03-26 02:08:06 -0500

Peter Roos

119 ●10 ●14 ●16

Hi,

We have a Pioneer P3AT robot with a rather outdated on-board PC - Pentium III 700 MHz with 256 MB RAM. The robot communicates with a powerful PC through Wi-Fi. In our current setup, the on-board PC runs a driver package (RosAria), a node for SICK laser, transformation and robot_state_publisher stuff. The following components run on the external PC: move_base, amcl, map_server, rviz.

This setup does perform pretty well.

We were thinking about an optimization - move every node to the robot's on-board PC except for rviz. This should make information flow more efficient, but the question is that will the robot's hardware handle this task.

Note: the on-board PC runs Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS in text mode.

edit retag flag offensive close merge delete

add a comment

1 Answer

Sort by » oldest newest most voted

answered 2013-03-26 06:56:45 -0500

ahendrix

47576 ●179 ●367 ●662 http://namniart.com/

The best way to find out is to try it and see.

You should be able to get some idea of how well it may work by looking at the current CPU usage on the robot and the desktop; if the robot is mostly idle (<25%), it's definitely worth a try. If the robot is already pretty busy (>50%), I probably wouldn't bother.

When you're running everything on the robot, be sure to watch the CPU usage and ROS console carefully; the navigation stack behaves pretty poorly if it doesn't get enough CPU time. You'll see lots of messages about various internal loops running too slowly if this is the case. Reducing the control loop frequencies and the costmap sizes or resolutions should help with this.

edit flag offensive delete link

add a comment

Question Tools

Stats

Asked: 2013-03-26 02:08:06 -0500

Seen: 289 times

Last updated: Mar 26 '13

Using navigation stack with outdated on-board PC edit

1 Answer

Question Tools

Stats

Related questions

Using navigation stack with outdated on-board PC