QUARC Linux QBot Platform Target

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The Linux QBot Platform target currently supports the Ubuntu O/S running on a NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano™ board. It is currently tailored for the Quanser QBot Platform. This section provides a general description of the QUARC Linux QBot Platform Target in addition to limitations and requirements for this target type. Please use the following list to refer to each topic:

Description
Limitations
Requirements

Description

The QUARC Linux QBot Platform Target currently supports the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Linux Operating System (OS) running on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano board. The Jetson Orin Nano board is offered by NVIDIA. The Jetson Orin Nano board contains 6-core Arm® Cortex®-A78AE v8.2, 1.5 GHz 64-bit CPU with 4 GB 64-bit LPDDR5 34 GB/s RAM. It also contains a 512-core NVIDIA Ampere GPU with 16 Tensor cores. The Jetson Orin Nano is suitable for computationally intensive applications, including artificial intelligence and image processing.

On the Quanser QBot Platform, it also supports USB3, HDMI, 1 Gb LAN, 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz WiFi, one 2 MP downward-facing wide-angle global shutter camera, an Intel D435 RGBD stereoscopic camera, I2C, SPI, UART, encoders, PWM, LCD display, buttons, LIDAR and GPIO.

The QUARC Linux QBot Platform Target is a soft real-time system. The Ubuntu Linux operating system is not designed to guarantee that events are always processed within a particular timeframe, as in a hard real-time system. Thus, if an operation misses its deadline, it is considered "less" than correct but not an application or system failure. The system simply tolerates the missed deadline and performs the operation with delay. In real-time applications, this behaviour is undesirable since all operations must meet their deadlines. In particular, real-time control applications expect the sampling rate of the controller to be maintained, and no samples to be missed.

To minimize the delays in processing real-time events, the QUARC Linux QBot Platform Target assigns the highest possible priority to a model's real-time code. The threads of the real-time code will preempt the threads of all other processes, including operating system processes performing important tasks, such as networking. Hence, a real-time process that executes for more than a brief interval may cause networking to be unresponsive, for example.

Please keep in mind that using QUARC with a QUARC Linux QBot Platform Target still requires a Windows host. Details on this requirement are given in the Requirements section of this page.

For more information about the data acquisition "cards" supported by the QUARC Linux QBot Platform Target, please refer to the QUARC Data Acquisition Card Support reference section in the QUARC documentation.

Limitations

There are a number of limitations imposed on the QUARC Linux QBot Platform Target. The following is a list of these limitations:

Real-Time Performance

Warning The QUARC Linux QBot Platform Target is a soft real-time system. For real-time processes with critical time constraints (e.g. advanced robotics), this target may not be suitable.

Sampling Rates

Warning While fast sampling rates may be specified, rates faster than 2 kHz are not recommended as jitter increases at faster sample rates.

Requirements

Code is generated in QUARC on a remote Windows host for the QBot Platform target, as MATLAB and Simulink do not run natively on the target. Hence, MATLAB, Simulink and QUARC are required on a Windows host PC. Please note that even though QUARC must be installed on the Windows host, it is still necessary to have QUARC installed on the QBot Platform target, since the QUARC Target Manager must be present where the generated code is running.

Please note that if your only intended target is an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano, the QUARC Windows target is not required and you can select not to install that component when installing QUARC. However the QUARC Simulink Development Environment component is required to generate code from your Simulink models. The NVIDIA 9.4 cross-compiler is required.

Once the code is generated on the Windows host, it is automatically downloaded to the QBot Platform target. In order to achieve this, QUARC must also be installed on the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano. The QUARC installer for the QBot Platform target is available as debian packages online via Quanser cloud repositories that are already configured on the QBot Platform. The quarc-runtime meta-package installs the necessary components for QUARC, and the python3-quanser-apis meta-package installs the necessary components for python3 development. The QBot Platform will already have QUARC installed but can also be updated using the standard debian package manager utilties, including the Gnome Software Updater.

Technical Support Package

Warning Due to the high flexibility and customizability of an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano system, Quanser only provides limited technical support. If required, please contact the Quanser Sales department for more details regarding running QUARC on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano board interfacing with your own application(s). The following is a link to the Quanser Support site.

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