NVIDIA Jetson TK1

[Mr. Lim]

I'm really interested in the various Jetson TK1 trials teams are doing right now. I probably should've gotten one some time ago.

A few questions for anyone with one of these units:

1) How quickly does it boot up once powered on?

2) Does anything become corrupted if you repeatedly hard power on/off in the middle of ?

3) Has anyone tried wiring it directly to unregulated 12V on the PDP, and driven a robot hard to see if it browns-out or powers off?

[marshall]

Originally Posted by Mr. Lim

I'm really interested in the various Jetson TK1 trials teams are doing right now. I probably should've gotten one some time ago.

A few questions for anyone with one of these units:

1) How quickly does it boot up once powered on?

2) Does anything become corrupted if you repeatedly hard power on/off in the middle of ?

3) Has anyone tried wiring it directly to unregulated 12V on the PDP, and driven a robot hard to see if it browns-out or powers off?

Answers

1) Fast. Less than 20 seconds. Can be tweaked to go even faster.

2) We haven't seen anything become corrupted but as I have said previously in this thread and others, it's a linux system. Rebooting it repeatedly uncleanly is going to cause some pain with fsck at some point so just be mindful and take necessary steps to avoid it.

3) Not yet. We will be doing that soon. I would recommend a regulator. For this year, the VRM has some 2A points where it could be plugged in and should be fine, assuming the rules allow for that.

EDIT: My one new comment is that after a recent discussion and some more benchmarking and other nonsense, I will add that not all CUDA cores are created equal over at Nvidia. The CUDA cores on the tegras are not the CUDA cores on the graphics cards in your super awesome gaming rig. The bottom line is that extra horsepower is not an excuse for sloppy coding and this is still an embedded system so efficient code is key. Also, memory management between the CPU and GPU has proven to be tricky.

[marshall]

First successful test getting data from the Jetson to the RoboRIO and controlling the robot. 900 HQ was a happy place last night.


Full Size Image Here

[Caboose]

To steal a bit of thunder from Marshall, I just made a thread with links to our code on GitHub. THREAD: Team 900 - nVIDIA Jetson TK1 OpenCV Co-Processor

[Caboose]

Hey all,

I just posted links to 900's code, including vision, over here. Ask questions if you have any there please.

[sparkytwd]

For those interested in continuing with TK1 development, I've gotten Ubuntu working on the Acer CB5-311 notebook, this one.

Using this script and the regular chrubuntu instructions it was pretty straight forward to get up and running.

Got the CUDA examples building and running locally. It's nice having a portable development so students can work on the same platform as running on the robot.

Quick Edit: This was entered on a CB5-311

[faust1706]

Are you going to make a script to install caffe with cudNN support? (if not, I'll write one up this weekend, or at the least a step by step guide). I feel caffe + cuda + cudNN is a more valuable and a different application of cuda than cuda based opencv.

My arguement: while opencv is great, teams have just about exhausted the real time use for it. Even with what 900 did, they were getting 15 fps. It's time to move on if we wish to advance what we are doing. The easiest way to do that, I argue, is to switch our roots entirely to a library that is more encompassing.

[marshall]

Originally Posted by sparkytwd

For those interested in continuing with TK1 development, I've gotten Ubuntu working on the Acer CB5-311 notebook, this one.

Using this script and the regular chrubuntu instructions it was pretty straight forward to get up and running.

Got the CUDA examples building and running locally. It's nice having a portable development so students can work on the same platform as running on the robot.

Quick Edit: This was entered on a CB5-311

Way cool! I'm happy to know that laptop works. Having something with a battery onboard the robot solves some logistical problems. Good stuff!

[sparkytwd]

Originally Posted by faust1706

Are you going to make a script to install caffe with cudNN support? (if not, I'll write one up this weekend, or at the least a step by step guide). I feel caffe + cuda + cudNN is a more valuable and a different application of cuda than cuda based opencv.

My arguement: while opencv is great, teams have just about exhausted the real time use for it. Even with what 900 did, they were getting 15 fps. It's time to move on if we wish to advance what we are doing. The easiest way to do that, I argue, is to switch our roots entirely to a library that is more encompassing.

I installed the cuda libraries using the Jetson instructions. I think an automatic script would be a great idea.

The biggest issue for teams and the neural network stuff is going to be collecting good training data and building a useful model. Ideally you'd have targets for recognition in-situ, but practice fields are usually unavailable until later in the season.

I wouldn't take a single implementation as setting the bar for what's possible. Even setting aside the CUDA cores, 4 2ghz ARMv7 cores are quite capable.

[sparkytwd]

Originally Posted by marshall

Way cool! I'm happy to know that laptop works. Having something with a battery onboard the robot solves some logistical problems. Good stuff!

I picked up the laptop due to issues we had with reliability this year. We picked up 3 at the start of the year, and are down to 1 reliably working. One of them won't get past the bootloader on a regular basis, but if you sit on it with a serial console and spam reset it will eventually start.

The other refuses to power up at all. I suspect the first case was due to handling for cading a case, the second, due to a miscommunication, was connected to VBatt, not VReg(12).

The problem with the laptop form factor is the weight. I feel that with a good case and sufficient QA to make sure the device is connected to the regulated 12v supply this will be a reliable system for next year.

I'm also working on a UPS that would conform with this years regulations for giving about 30 seconds of power to safely shut down a co-processor. That being said, in the past 3 years, we haven't had issues with sudden power removal impacting the coprocessors.

[faust1706]

Originally Posted by sparkytwd

I wouldn't take a single implementation as setting the bar for what's possible. Even setting aside the CUDA cores, 4 2ghz ARMv7 cores are quite capable.

To my understanding, 900 was the first team to implement a complete machine learning based vision solution. OpenCV is not regarded as a machine (deep) learning library. It seems only natural to switch to a library that has at least an emphasis on this, instead of an after thought.

Their implementation, cascade training, is an extremely light version of machine learning by comparison, and they were getting 15 fps. Unless teams are going to start putting *entire computers on their robot, and struggle to reliably power it off of the PDB as well as dedicate that much space, something has to change. Also cost must be considered for a computer; Between a motherboard, memory, cpu and gpu, it adds up fast.

You could always off-board everything, but then you're limiting yourself to the bandwidth limit.

*In 2012, 1706 did have an entire computer on their robot. It had 8 gb of ram, an i5 and ran ubuntu. We were averaging 20 fps (though we were doing a real time pose calculation, so that's actually really good with everything considered). I personally don't recommend unless absolutely needed.

[marshall]

Originally Posted by sparkytwd

I picked up the laptop due to issues we had with reliability this year. We picked up 3 at the start of the year, and are down to 1 reliably working. One of them won't get past the bootloader on a regular basis, but if you sit on it with a serial console and spam reset it will eventually start.

The other refuses to power up at all. I suspect the first case was due to handling for cading a case, the second, due to a miscommunication, was connected to VBatt, not VReg(12).

The problem with the laptop form factor is the weight. I feel that with a good case and sufficient QA to make sure the device is connected to the regulated 12v supply this will be a reliable system for next year.

I'm also working on a UPS that would conform with this years regulations for giving about 30 seconds of power to safely shut down a co-processor. That being said, in the past 3 years, we haven't had issues with sudden power removal impacting the coprocessors.

Rock on! Keep us posted. I'm all for opening up options to teams for this sort of stuff. We're about a day or two away from getting our white paper out for what we worked on this year. Nothing earth shattering but we want to share it and make this stuff a little more accessible.

[ForeverAlon]

Here is a link to team 900's vision whitepaper: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh....php?p=1484741

[Caboose]

FYI, the Jetson TX1 was recently released.

[dusty_nv]

Jetson TK1 is included in Kit of Parts again this year for FIRST 2016, and in addition, the new 1TFLOP+ Jetson TX1 is available for FIRST teams to use via discount: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=141133