• • • AI • • •
WHY THE RIGHT CHOICE OF LINUX OS CAN HELP A NEW ROBOTICS
PRODUCT GET TO MARKET FASTER Until now, a robot was the creature of its maker: the scope of its operations was limited by the software instructions programmed into it ByJustin Schneck, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, Peridio
T
hat’s all changing, thanks to AI: the next generation of AI-enabled robots will not only be able to sense their environment, but to understand it, not only detect objects, but recognise them. They will exhibit more and more autonomous characteristics.
The sophisticated new AI capabilities in robots require a high-performance compute platform: a processor board from a company such as Intel, NXP Semiconductors, Qualcomm or Nvidia which runs a Linux operating system (OS). But which Linux OS to choose? This decision affects the time it will take a robot manufacturer to take new products to market, as well as the productivity of its development team. And as we will see, the familiar and obvious choice is normally the wrong one.
Scaling from prototype to production
The Linux OS is the heart of an AI-enabled robot, providing crucial system management, task scheduling, prioritisation and connectivity functions. It is the Linux OS which enables the robot to run large AI algorithms alongside deterministic, real-time control functions without the system crashing because of conflicts over hardware resources.
The choice of Linux OS would ideally be carefully considered by development teams at the outset of a new design project. In practice, however, something different happens: time pressure drives developers towards familiar, off-the-shelf Linux OS choices, often the full-featured Linux OS products such as Ubuntu or Debian which developers use on their PC.
But the Linux version which seems most convenient for bringing an initial proof-of-concept of a robot to life is not the Linux OS that will survive the move from the lab to the production line, and then to the point of use. Once the robot design is finalised and goes to production, the Linux OS will be flashed into hundreds or thousands of units. And this is where the drawbacks of a Linux OS for PCs come fully to light.
The critical requirements:
security and maintenance One reason for the success of the open-source Linux OS in embedded devices such as robots is the ability to customise it, scaling it down to provide only the features that the application needs. By contrast, a PC has almost no hardware
constraints, so a PC’s off-the-shelf distro includes every possible feature of the Linux OS. But this is precisely what makes the PC’s distro a bad fit for production units of a new robot design: the full-featured OS presents a large surface for cyber-attackers to target, and so increases the frequency with which the robot manufacturer must develop and deploy security updates, as well as increasing the size of update packages.
A lean Linux distro for embedded devices
There are alternative options. The Linux ecosystem provides robot manufacturers with the freedom to develop their own, tailored version of the Linux OS: the Yocto Project is an open-source resource for building custom Linux distros, but is notoriously hard to use for all but battle-hardened Linux OS experts. And developing a custom Linux distro from scratch takes time, further slowing robot manufacturers’ time to market.
This is the problem which the Avocado OS, a new open-source Linux distro, solves: like a custom embedded Linux distro, it is lean and easily scalable to hundreds of thousands of production units. But unlike a custom distro developed in the Yocto Project, it is available off-the-shelf, ready to
38 ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING • NOVEMBER 2025
support both development and production from day one. For developers, it offers tooling and workflows which accelerate embedded development. And once a new design goes to production, the same Avocado OS includes enterprise-level security features backed by device and fleet management capabilities which streamline the maintenance of robots in the field.
A smooth path from
development to production It is this combination of developer-friendly features and production-ready security and scalability which make Avocado OS the ideal choice for robot manufacturers. In contrast, developers who use a full-featured Linux OS in prototype designs face the pain and delay associated with porting their code to a lean, custom OS when the design goes into production.
Users of Avocado OS avoid the pain, as the same Linux system used in development can be hardened and deployed to the field, helping new robot designs get to market faster with stronger security capabilities and better device management features.
https://www.peridio.com
electricalengineeringmagazine.co.uk
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