Axion Racing tapped Linux and other open-source software to help navigate its driverless “Spirit” car in last week's DARPA Urban Challenge. Details of the team's novel approach, which involved running Linux on a Sony PlayStation 3, are revealed in an interesting article at LinuxInsider.

Spread the word: digg this story

The LinuxInsider story details how Terra Soft Solutions integrated its Yellow Dog Linux distribution with the PS3 and its Cell Be processor, to manage Spirit's on-board, real-time image processing system. The goal: navigating simulated city traffic in the qualifying rounds of the DARPA Urban Challenge (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) autonomous vehicle test in Victorville, Calif. held during the last week of October.

Spirit on a test run in Victorville, Calif.
As previously reported when it successfully climbed Pike's Peak, Axion's Spirit UAV (unmanned, autonomous vehicle) is built on a 1994 Jeep Grand Cherokee. The UAV is stuffed with Dell servers, laser finders, stereo cameras, infrared cameras, and other equipment guided by twin Navcom Starfire GPS units.

To meet the greater challenge of an urban course, Axion decided to boost the PS3 application's skills with some embedded Linux. According to Terra Soft, they could not have met the tough, 10-day development deadline without an open source platform. For example, for a USB driver, they quickly rebuilt the UVC driver to support the PS3 kernel, and to import camera data, they borrowed frame-grabbing code from Fswebcam. To work with the image format converter, Netpbm came in handy.

Axion's team on location in Victorville, Calif.
Although Spirit did not make the final cut in the competition, the Linux/PS3 integration reportedly was a success. The full LinuxInsider story is available here.

---

 
This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.