BeagleBone Black is a low-cost development platform based on an ARM Cortex A8 processor. This board is fabricated with a Linux distribution called Ångström. Ångström was developed by a small group who wanted to unify Linux distribution for embedded systems. They wanted an operating system that was stable and user-friendly.
Texas Instruments designed BeagleBone Black thinking that the community of developers needed an on-board computer with some general purpose input/output (GPIO) pins. The BeagleBone Black platform is an evolution of the original BeagleBone. The main features of the board are an ARM Cortex A8 processor at 1 GHz with 512 MB RAM, and with Ethernet, USB, and HDMI connections and two headers of 46 GPIO pins.
This GPIO can be set up as digital I/O, ADC, PWM, or for communication protocol like I2C, SPI, or UART. The GPIO is an easy way to communicate with sensors and actuators directly from the BeagleBone without intermediaries. The following is a labeled image of BeagleBone:
When the BeagleBone board came out, it was not possible to install ROS on the Ångström distribution. For this reason, it was common to install an operating system based on Ubuntu on the BeagleBone. There are different versions of Ubuntu ARM compatible with the BeagleBone Black and ROS; we recommend that you use an image of Ubuntu ARM 16.04 Xenial armhf on the platform to work with ROS.
Now, an ROS version for Ångström distribution is ready to be installed; you can do so following the installation steps given at http://wiki.ros.org/kinetic/Installation/Angstrom. Despite this possibility, we have chosen to install ROS on Ubuntu ARM because these distributions are more common and can be used on other ARM-based boards such as UDOO, ODROIDU3, ODROIDX2, or Gumstick.
ARM technology is booming with the use of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. Apart from the increasing computer power of the ARM cortex, the great level of integration and low consumption has made this technology suitable for autonomous robotic systems. In the last few years, multiple ARM platforms for developers have been launched in the market. Some of them have features similar to the BeagleBone Black, such as the Raspberry PI or the Gumstick Overo. Additionally, more powerful boards like GumstickDuoVero with a Dual Core ARM Cortex A9 or some quad core boards like OdroidU3, OdroidX2 or UDOO are now available.