Performance Evaluation of Real-Time System for Vision-Based Navigation of Small Autonomous Mobile Robots

Real-time operation systems (RTOS) have become very important to the development of autonomous mobile robots. The choice of RTOS has tremendous sway with processor utilization, response time, and real-time jitter. In this paper, we present experimental trials and analyze the feasibility of RTOS on a single-board computer for image recognition and vision-based navigation of small autonomous robot. Several real-time (RT) patches Linux frequently used not only in robotics are implemented and tested on the Raspberry Pi2 equipped with a native camera board. To study the speed of image recognition (classification) OpenCV library was used. Test results show that the RT Patch Linux can produce higher throughput compared to Xenomai, but it can be seen that RT systems almost did not affect the speed of static images recognition systems almost did not affect the speed of image recognition.