GStreamer empowers a cute robot in the International Space Station

[Jan Schmidt]

Hi,

On 20/07/17 16:48, Yasushi SHOJI wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Some of you might already see this in the news.  Japan Aerospace
> Exploration Agency (Jaxa) has sent a cute camera robot, called
> Int-Ball, to the International Space Station (ISS).
>
> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-40640039
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_A-yb8rlac
> https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Jaxa+Int-Ball&ia=news
>
> We, Atmark Techno, have participated the project and have chosen to
> run GStreamer to downlink the video stream from the main camera on the
> robot.  That is, the ISS video clip you see was produced by GStreamer!
> Woohoo!
Needless to say, that is completely awesome. Thanks for letting us know
that our software is in space!

I see some glitching in the downlinked video feed that looks regular
enough to be packet loss from keyframe bitrate bursts. If that's the
cause, you might check if the Renesas hardware encoder supports an
intra-refresh mode, or else smooth the delivery bitrate using the
max-bitrate property of udpsink.

So awesome and かわいーね！

Cheers,
Jan.
> The robot is assembled with a few parts.  One of the parts responsible
> for the video streaming is using Armadillo-810, a single-board
> computer we designed and sell.  The board is based on Renesas'
> R-Mobile A1 SoC.  The SoC has a built-in H.264 hardware encoder.
> GStreamer handles the images from the main camera, pushes them to the
> encoder and downlink encoded video stream.
>
> https://www.renesas.com/en-us/products/communications-and-mobile-devices/r-mobile/r-mobile-a1.html
>
> Unfortunately, we are not allowed to disclose the pipeline we are
> using for the robot.  So I have not much more to say.  But if you are
> interested in, drop me a line.  I'll try my best to answer your
> technical question.
>
> At last, but not least, we thank you all of you working on and using
> GStreamer.  With out you guys, Int-ball wouldn't be able to send
> FullHD video stream from the ISS.
>
> Thanks,