A top shipbuilding company has licensed a commercial, real-time embedded Linux operating system for use in three robotic manufacturing devices, including two currently in production. FSMLabs says its Korean partner, RealTimeWave, helped Samsung Heavy Industries (SHI) develop the robotic shipbuilding devices, which are based… on RTLinuxPro.

(Click for larger view of SHI's Spider welder)

SHI's current RTLinux Pro-based robots include a “Spider” welder (pictured above), said to autonomously guide itself over a ship's membrane wall, and a pipe alignment robot. A third “Stewart-Gough Type 6-axes parallel robot” based on the real-time, commercial Linux variant is also under development.

SHI principal research engineer Young-Jun Park said, “RTLinuxPro has a unique capability of combining very precise real-time with the standard Linux platform so that we could make the time sensitive control algorithms operate together with background processing without worrying about interference.”

SHI managing director Jae-Hun Kim added, “We think there will be much future growth [in the ship automation and building automation system markets], and RTLinux is a key technology for us in this area.”

SHI is the third-largest shipbuilder in South Korea, behind Hyundai and Daewoo. South Korea leads the world in shipbuilding, with China gaining ground, according to the International Herald Tribune.

 
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