4 ms·

And what do you think about elixir/erlang? Great error handling and ability to send/receive fast messages. Wouldn't that be suitable for really complex robots (

And what do you think about elixir/erlang? Great error handling and ability to send/receive fast messages. Wouldn't that be suitable for really complex robots (e.g. humanoids) to get inputs from surrounding environment? (I'm completely naif on this subject, maybe my question doesn't even make any sense)

seren 10y ago
It depends what you are calling a robot, but if you are moving legs or arms close to human, you don't want to have soft real time capabilities but definitely hard real time for safety reasons. This is why C is still king. So likely we will still have C/C++ for the low level, low latency, and then for higher level, well whatever you want, including javascript. For example, ROS [0] have various bindings available python, lisp, (also ruby I believe), etc. [0] http://www.ros.org/ http://www.ros.org/
pedalpete 10y ago
I don't know much about erlang or elixir. Erlang was popular at work for a short period of time, but I think more people are fans of Haskell now (seems Scala may even be falling out of favor a bit). As Seren said, C is pretty much defacto at the moment. C has a fairly large community. What would be gained by using Erlang? My understanding is that Erlang is geared toward distributed systems. I can absolutely imagine an massively distributed control system would benefit from Erlang. If you think of 'robotics' like cars where there is essentially a different robot for each control, maybe Erlang is a good fit. If the device is going to have a single CPU, maybe not so much. It really depends on the application and the architecture, but to me, Erland isn't a natural choice.
- merdreubu 10y ago
  You get a lot from Erlang VM. Among other things: by far the best VM instrumentation out there, rock solid stability, fault tolerance and hot code loading, exemplified in this little video of a drone in-flight flying control system upgrade https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96UzSHyp0F8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96UzSHyp0F8 On the Elixir side of things, there's something like the Rails of embedded development in the making, a project called Nerves. This is a recent presentation on the project: Justin Schneck - Enhanced Embedded Systems with Nerves (ElixirConfEU 2016) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=118-g0ODfgg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=118-g0ODfgg

seren 10y ago

It depends what you are calling a robot, but if you are moving legs or arms close to human, you don't want to have soft real time capabilities but definitely hard real time for safety reasons. This is why C is still king. So likely we will still have C/C++ for the low level, low latency, and then for higher level, well whatever you want, including javascript. For example, ROS [0] have various bindings available python, lisp, (also ruby I believe), etc. [0] http://www.ros.org/ http://www.ros.org/

pedalpete 10y ago

I don't know much about erlang or elixir. Erlang was popular at work for a short period of time, but I think more people are fans of Haskell now (seems Scala may even be falling out of favor a bit). As Seren said, C is pretty much defacto at the moment. C has a fairly large community. What would be gained by using Erlang? My understanding is that Erlang is geared toward distributed systems. I can absolutely imagine an massively distributed control system would benefit from Erlang. If you think of 'robotics' like cars where there is essentially a different robot for each control, maybe Erlang is a good fit. If the device is going to have a single CPU, maybe not so much. It really depends on the application and the architecture, but to me, Erland isn't a natural choice.

merdreubu 10y ago
You get a lot from Erlang VM. Among other things: by far the best VM instrumentation out there, rock solid stability, fault tolerance and hot code loading, exemplified in this little video of a drone in-flight flying control system upgrade https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96UzSHyp0F8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96UzSHyp0F8 On the Elixir side of things, there's something like the Rails of embedded development in the making, a project called Nerves. This is a recent presentation on the project: Justin Schneck - Enhanced Embedded Systems with Nerves (ElixirConfEU 2016) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=118-g0ODfgg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=118-g0ODfgg