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Our Blogs Open Sauce Debian powers robotic sub to victory | Debian powers robotic sub to victory |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Tuesday, 13 October 2009 | |
  
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The Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition is sponsored by the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International and the Office of Naval Research. It was held at a large acoustic testing pool operated by the US Navy Space and Naval Warfare Systems Centre. The competition calls for entries to pass through a gate, follow a path, ram a submerged buoy, fire through a square target with small torpedoes, drop markers into bins containing simulated targets, recover a PVC target and surface through an octagonal shape. Human intervention is not allowed, according to a media release from the Debian project. The team from Cornell managed to complete the entire course with their robotic submarine called Nova. Only MIT, in 2002, has matched this feat. Nova runs a custom software stack atop a single board computer which runs GNU/Linux and relies heavily on Debian. The Cornell team software leader, Benjamin Siedenberg, was quoted as saying the team had consolidated on Debian three years ago. "When I joined, we had computers running Windows XP, Windows Server, Debian, Ubuntu, FreeBSD and Gentoo. Now we've settled on Debian for the sub and the servers; our lab workstations dual-boot Debian and Windows. It's a lot easier to manage, and it's great to be able to develop in the same environment that the submarine runs," Siedenberg said. Other open source software such as OpenCV (image processing) and libdc1394 (video capture) are also used by the team. Arseney Romanenko, another member of the software team, said these libraries were essential for doing vision processing in an embedded environment; they were fast and lightweight, translating into significant power savings. The Debian project was founded in 1993 by Ian Murdock and releases a GNU/Linux distribution that is second to none. It caters to the largest number of architectures of any distribution and its next version will include a port to the FreeBSD kernel. |
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