About 4 months ago I bought the Jetson TX2 development board and tried to install the JetPack software to it …….. but after many hours of struggle, I got pretty much nowhere. Fortunately, the next release, JetPack 3.3, worked a lot better and I finally managed to get a working system up and running:

The installation uses two computers running Ubuntu and the tricks that I used are:

• Make a fresh install of Ubuntu 16.04 (2018) on the host computer
• Use the network settings panel to set up the USB interface, particularly the IPv4 settings. The documentation gives an address of 192.168.55.2, so enter this then 255.255.255.0 then 255.255.255.0 again. When the install itself asks for the address. use: 192.168.55.1.
• There must be an internet connection !
• Make sure the install knows which internet device to use eg Wi-Fi / Bluetooth / whatever. A router switch is NOT required as the install will automatically switch between the internet and USB connection whenever it needs to, as long as it was told before hand which connection to use.

The plan is to spend the colder Winter months developing an object based navigation system for the machine so, for example, it can use the plants themselves to enhance the overall navigation accuracy. We'll still be using GNSS, electrical cables, barcodes etc but will eventually give mathematical weighting to the techniques that prove to be more useful.