Axion Racing was the first team to autonomously drive up to the top of Colorado's Pike Peak and now leads the way by finding cutting edge uses for the beleaguered Sony PS3. This two time DARPA Grand Challenge qualifier is the first racing team to implement Yellow Dog Linux and a Sony PlayStation game console to manage one of seven autonomous vehicle cameras.

U.K.-based Thorcom Systems Ltd is shipping a rugged, Debian Linux-based, in-vehicle computer intended for emergency first responders. The GPS-equipped VR2000 can serve as an application host, IP router, and vehicle locater in a wide range of mobile data, vehicle tracking, and in-vehicle communications and networking applications, according to the company.

RoboCup, an international joint project to promote artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and related fields, has set a goal for fully autonomous, humanoid robots to win the world soccer championship by 2050. With the use of Fedora, one RoboCup team, the AllemaniACs, is already winning international acclaim with world champion titles in 2006 and 2007 in the RoboCup@Home service robotics league.

One programmer, Ricardo Correia, has what could be an answer, however. A technology called Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE), introduced in the 2.6.14 kernel released in October 2005, enables Linux to use filesystems that run as ordinary processes. FUSE already hosts an implementation of the NTFS filesystem, NTFS-3g, that runs with decent performance.

This is the ranger SRV robot ('Satcam Robotic Vehicle') is a rugged robot based on the surveyor open source robot. It can be remote controlled over the internet or programmed for autonomous missions.

Tokyo-based ZMP Inc. is readying a Linux-based car robotics platform designed to test automotive robots and autonomous navigation algorithms. The RoboCar is built on a 500MHz AMD Geode LX800, and offers a stereo camera, multiple sensors, and an optional image recognition module.

IBM Corp. and the University of Florida believe they've come up with middleware that will allow doctors to remotely monitor the health of their patients.

A team of experts and students from NICTA and the University of NSW have won first place in a major international technology competition for developing a robotically operated, computer-driven clarinet that runs on Linux.

It is well known that the so-called "solid-state disks" (SSD) have very low access times. I could have tried to buy an SSD, but being a tinkerer, I decided for another option. Thumb drives / flash drives / pen drives are also a kind of SSDs, one could say - but they have lousy transfer rates. In the end, I decided to create a software RAID using four 2GB USB drives.