Robotics & Automation News

Market trends and business perspectives

linux

DJI uses Ubuntu in drone computer

by

Ubuntu, the most popular Linux operating system for the Internet of Things, is now available on the Manifold 2, a high-performance embedded computer offered by drone manufacturer, DJI.

The Manifold 2 is designed to fit onto DJI’s drone platforms via the onboard SDK and enables developers to transform aerial platforms into truly smarter drones, performing complex computing tasks and advanced image processing, which in-turn creates rapid flexibility for enterprise usage.

As part of the offering, the Manifold 2 is planning to feature snaps. Snaps are containerised software packages, designed to work perfectly across cloud, desktop, and IoT devices – with this the first instance of the technology’s availability on drones.

[Read more…] about DJI uses Ubuntu in drone computer

Interview with Ubuntu boss: A rich ecosystem for robotics and automation systems

by

Exclusive interview with Mike Bell from Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu

There’s a lot of talk about the Robot Operating System. Understandably so. But the most widely used operating system in robotics and automation systems development is actually Ubuntu. 

In fact, ROS is not actually an operating system at all – it’s a set of software frameworks, or a software development kit, to be installed into an operating system like Ubuntu.

As Mike Bell, executive vice president of internet of things and devices at Canonical, explains in an exclusive interview: “It’s a bit confusing because it’s called Robot Operating System, but the reason is because if you’re developing robot applications, you don’t need to worry about the fact that it’s running on Ubuntu.

“You just write your application to interface into a ROS SDK and then deploy on Ubuntu.”  [Read more…] about Interview with Ubuntu boss: A rich ecosystem for robotics and automation systems

Google open sources TensorFlow Serving

by

Tensor_Flow_Diagram1_Serving_FINALAfter releasing its deep learning or machine learning library TensorFlow as open source software a few months ago, Google has now followed up by open sourcing TensorFlow Serving, which the company says makes it easier to take models into production.

Noah Fiedel, Google software engineer, writes on his blog: “TensorFlow Serving makes the process of taking a model into production easier and faster.

“It allows you to safely deploy new models and run experiments while keeping the same server architecture and APIs.”

TensorFlow Serving is written in C++ and supports Linux. Fidel says the software requires minimal overhead. “In our benchmarks we recoded approximately 100,000 queries per second per core on a 16 vCPU Intel Xeon E5 2.6 GHz machine, excluding gRPC and the TensorFlow inference processing time.”