Research controller options

[joseluizmendonca]

We need to chose how are we going to control this rover! Main things to keep in mind are:

• How much processing power do we need? What kind of applications would we need to run?
• Do we need graphics processing power? How much?
• Raspi, possible solution?
• Laptop?
• End goal: create requirements list, and based on that decide what hardware to use!

We can organize a meeting sometime during this week (or during the weekend) to talk personally about it! If there are any questions, I am available most times!

[joseluizmendonca]

Hey @mmthu0121 , I hope you already had some time to check out the new system, and get familiar with it!

I took the liberty of creating an issue for the task, so that you start straight away working on it on the repo!!!

Once you have done some research about it, we can organize a meeting to discuss options!!!

Also, if you need any support, please let me know!

[mmthu0121]

@joseluizmendonca so far, I have done data collection on 4 controllers, you can check it here.

I will try to do more research about other possible controllers and how compactable they are, including the researched ones too.

[leandroebner]

that's actually great work, thanks @mmthu0121! I heard that the Nvidia Jetson are not "super reliable" working out of the box compared the PI with ros?

[mmthu0121]

@leandroebner I will try to make some research about it and the software compatibility. Caltech used Nano to build a Mars Rover so it seems enough but I'm not sure with how compatible Nano and Pi will be with our whole system yet.

[mmthu0121]

I have done some more researches about the compatibility of Nano and Pi5 to ROS and I found some discussions.

In this reddit discussion, one of them said "I used Nvidia Jetson at work, and it had a lot of challenges. I say only get the Jetson if you know you are going to be making use of CUDA, otherwise, go with the Pi that has tons of community support. I spent so much time banging my head against various issues with little information online".

And another comment is that Nano can support only up to Ubuntu 18.04 (EOL) and some said 20.04 (1 year left in support) is possible but not sure. We might have to conside it since we are using ROS on Linux.

The better hardware comparison of these two can be seen on this website.

For CAN Bus, Both Raspberry Pi 5 and Jetson Nano don't have buit-in but can connected through GPIO pins, which both have.
This is one example module, Waveshare RS485/CAN.

This is as much as I have done research and I cannot decide by myself since I cannot estimate our processing requirement.

To be noted, Jetson Nano has no built-in wifi or bluetooth module.

This is as much as I have researched. The spreadsheet I shared before is here (again).

@leandroebner @joseluizmendonca