Jetson TX2 or Xavier NX for Model Predictive Control/Estimation for Medium Sized MAV (GPU support)

Autonomous Machines Jetson & Embedded Systems Jetson TX2
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Dear All,

I am new to community and kindly would like to ask your opinion about my project. I am PhD student in EPFL in robotics. I am working with drones and study Model Predictive Control (MPC) based approach to control/estimate multiple drones. I have medium-sized MAVs. Previously, I was using Raspberry Pi 3b (4-core 1.2 GHz Arm A53) as onboard computer to run my stacks in Robot Operating System (ROS). (I have a budget of 10W at most). However, I realized that the CPU is not powerful enough to run my optimization routines in desired frequency. So I decided to upgrade my onboard computer to one of the Jetson modules. As I have seen from the website, there are two main/strong alternatives: Jetson TX2 and Jetson Xavier NX. My questions are:

  1. I have not used a board with GPU before. Is it possible to configure GPU such that it helps CPU for processing?
  2. Which one (Xavier NX or TX2) is more suitable for this kind of application?
  3. Is there any support to use ROS with CPU+GPU?
  4. Where can I find carrier boards for the modules?

Thank you in advance for your support. Kind regards,
Kagan Erunsal

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Hi ekagani88,

Welcome to Jetson & Embedded Systems forum.
I can’t give the exact answer due to there are too many use cases and applications, however you can find many Jetson based projects sharing at Jetson Projects forum as reference.
You also can refer to Jetson Zoo to find those instructions for installing various open source add-on packages and frameworks on NVIDIA Jetson.
You should be able to buy the devkits from your region distributor, please visit https://developer.nvidia.com/buy-jetson

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A little late but, in my opinion I would say:

  1. It is. You can multithread different task and each task can be uploaded to the gpu, I suppose it can even be done asynchronously.
  2. Set a target performance and if you are sure about the 10W, for example, the Jetson Nano can work at a power mode of 10W. If more power is needed, look at the Xavier NX, the successor of the TX2.
  3. There is suport for ROS for the Jetson series, take a look at the blog JetsonHacks.
  4. You have a lot of third parties manufacturing carrier boards for the modules, it also depends on what you need (like connectors and so on).

I hope I could help

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Hello FelipeVW,

Thank you very much for your replies.

Best,
Kagan