Best ARM board for ROS

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I would like to get an opinion on what people think is the best ARM board for ROS.

I have tried the dragonboard, raspberry PI3 and beaglebone black. beaglebone does not have the horsepower to run ROS (moveit,etc). I think that a quad core A53 might be the minimum required.

Anyway comments welcome.

Shawn

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HI @Shawn_Schaerer,

Iā€™ve tried all those and my advice for new projects would be to have a look at the new NVIDIA Jetson TX1 module. IMO itā€™s by far the best ARM embedded board where to run ROS and friends.

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@vmayoral how is the TX1 compared to the TK1?

I have used the TK1 myself, and it has the capabilities to be extremely powerful, however all of nvidia images are given out with low power settings so you have to configure it all yourself (i also noticed that it had a issue with IRQ balancing, which till this day I dont believe got fixed)

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Hi,

Yes, the TX1 would be a great board (or the TK1). I should have clarified and said best board under 120.
I am considering Pine64 but I will have to wait and see about it. I am a bit disappointed by the RPI3ā€™s OS and lack of 64bit support.

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Hi @l0g1x,
I jumped directly to the TX1 so Iā€™m afraid i canā€™t comment on that.

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Has anyone used an old flagship phone as a ā€œARM targetā€? Iā€™d like to use some old android phones that still have a good 2GB of RAM + 64-bit ARMv8 that include a swath of radios, sensors, self contained power supply. Buying one retail might be above your $120 mark, but if you have one siting around in a relatives junk droor or with a cracked screen off ebayā€¦

I know there is ROS for android with ROSJava, but flashing phones with a more common flavor of Linux and treating as a traditional embedded target has always been appealing to me. I think mobile device hardware support is a bit fractured thanks to device manufactures, so Iā€™ve only seen posts with Nexus and Ubuntu Touch, nothing like an old Samsung I have.
Relevant ROS Answers post: http://answers.ros.org/question/206862/ros-on-google-nexus-5/

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I was hoping to use the BBB for a mobile robot doing things like SLAM, localization, and navigation (move_base). So no need for image/video processing, only spinning LiDAR. From my testing, it doesnā€™t look adequate even for that, unfortunately.

How do people feel about the Odroids? http://www.hardkernel.com/main/main.php

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ODROID XU-4 is pretty awesome. It has a USB3 host, and if you have a USB3 peripheral that you need to talk to, I donā€™t think there are many (any?) similarly-sized and similarly-priced options at the moment.

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+1 for the XU-4. It can run a surprisingly serious ROS setup (motion planning, depth image processing). Iā€™ve just bought a C2 as well; havenā€™t had a chance to try it out yet though.

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spmaniato

You can use the BBB but for me using MoveIt it the CPU ran around 80-90 percent during planning. Which is not good. Using the DB410C or RPI3 it runs around 60-70 percent.

I have not used an Odroid, but have used SolidRun cubox and Radxa rock and TK1.

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Since you mentioned depth image processing: did you try connecting an Asus Xtion to the XU-4? Does it work?

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Nice discussion with interesting answers.

Just to mention my experience:

I also used ROS in rpi2 rpi3, bbb and Odroid XU4 successfuly in several
projects.
I did not used MoveIt but I can tell that it is enough to support some SLAM
systems if the algorithms parameters are well tuned for efficiency.
Specifically odroid is quite powerful and it is able to execute this kind
of heavy applications fluently.

Kind Regards.

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we have used xu4 with turtlebot with asus camera

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@Pablo_Inigo_Blasco, have you ever tried running the navigation stack (i.e., amcl + move_base) on a BBB by any chance? Iā€™ve found that, even with relaxed parameters, it cannot handle it. But I may be doing something wrong. (It can definitely handle amcl plus the laser scan publisher and other drivers. Itā€™s move_base that takes it over the edge in my experience.)

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I also like the ODROID XU-4 for using USB 3.0. On the one hand ā€˜IntelĀ® RealSenseā„¢ Robotic Development Kitā€™ is now available. It is fantastic for the user using RealSense or other USB 3.0 device (but a little bit expensive than other SBC). How about it?


http://www.up-board.org/specifications/

  • IntelĀ® Atomā„¢ x5-Z8350 Processor (2M Cache, 1.44 GHz up to 1.92 GHz) CPU with 64 bit architecture; Quad Core
  • IntelĀ® HD 400 Graphics
  • 1~4G DDR3L
  • USB 2.0 and USB 3.0
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Yeah, we also used it with an asus xtion. We set the depth resolution very low (QVGA or QQVGA) mainly because we didnā€™t need the extra pixels. Overall It worked quite well though.

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i tried Pine64+ and installed Ros from source on it ros indigo with ubuntu 16.04
it is very good
you can download image from

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@eslamnet10 Itā€™s great to know that it works for you with Indigo on the Pine64.

Thanks for taking the effort to share however I have to not recommend people grab it. Binary images of unknown provenance are potential security risks.

If you wouldnā€™t mind it would be great if you could share your experience bringing up Indigo on the Pine64 with as much info as you can remember in a new thread in this category. Also did you try using the Debian Jessie builds with Kinetic from debian packages?

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i tried Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with indigo and i will make it for Kinetic also
i tried Kinetic with it but i stopped to make meta-ros yocto core-image-minimal for raspberry pi 2 and it works now i will upload it soon also and i will build Kinetic with Ubuntu16.04 LTS

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I have Kinetic running on Pine64 under debian. works great. Kinetic is still missing some packages that should be synced in two weeks.

All of the ARM A53 boards perform similarly to me. I do like the 96Boards form factor the best

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