Team Jefferson, Linux, and Tommy

Posted 16 Jun 2005 at 21:28 UTC by steve

A LinuxPlanet article gives a fairly complete account of Team Jefferson and their Linux-based DARPA Grand Challenge robot, Tommy. Paul Perrone and the other members of Team Jefferson have chosen Fedora Linux as the high-level OS for their robot. There are also embedded micro-controllers handling lower-level functions. Linux is commonly used in robotics aplications but Team Jefferson is unusual in that the chose Java as the development platform for both the Linux box and the microcontrollers. This "might raise a few eyebrows. After all, traveling at 40 miles an hour is no place to get stuck doing a garbage collection pass."

Timed GC and no GC, posted 17 Jun 2005 at 05:25 UTC by The Swirling Brain » (Master)

You could always force garbage collection to happen more often so as to limit the time it takes, or you could write your code in such a way as to not need garbage collection virtually at all. At any rate, I think Java's user agreement states something like don't use this language in mission critical or potentially life threatinging situations. :-)

hmm, posted 17 Jun 2005 at 11:24 UTC by dogsbody_d » (Master)

CMU's </a href="http://www.teambots.org/">Teambots</a> multi-robot development software thingy is written in Java.
I wonder if that means that it's not for mission critical apps either....;)