Luos Open-Source Real-Time Orchestrator

Posted by Clive “Max” Maxfield

Well, this isn’t something I expected to be talking about today, but my chum Ben Cook just introduced me to something that looks rather cool.

Ben is the Founder and Director at Airspeed Electronics Ltd., which is an electronic design consultancy that’s based in the UK specializing in high-performance acoustic detection and tracking technology for counter-unmanned aircraft system (UAS) applications. The folks at Airspeed Electronics are currently developing a drone detection and tracking system called MANTIS, where this work is being funded through a research grant provided by the UK Ministry of Defence (which — before you make a nasty comment — is how they spell “Defense” in the UK).

MANTIS, which stands for “MAchine learNing acousTIc Surveillance,” is a system of distributed, intelligent acoustic sensors that use artificial intelligence (AI) for the detection, classification, and location estimation of UAS — such as drones — based on their acoustic signatures.

But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about…

In his email to me, Ben spake as follows: “Have you heard of an embedded operating system called ‘Luos’ before? It’s a microservices software architecture, like docker but for use with microcontrollers. I have no affiliation, I just stumbled across this today and I’m thinking this could be very useful for some future projects. It looks really good for anything ‘modular-y,’ if you know what I mean…”

I do know what Ben means. I just meandered my way around the luos.io website, perused and pondered the documentation at docs.luos.io, and watched this video on YouTube (later today, I’m going to get the tattoo, buy the T-shirt, and see the stage play).

In a nutshell, Luos is a simple and lightweight open-source distributed operating system dedicated to embedded systems. It uses the concept of modularity to simplify the linking of components and chunks of application code together to form a single system image.

Consider a system like a robot that uses multiple microcontrollers to manage its various sensors, actuators, and motors. If each of these microcontrollers employs Luos technology, all of them can use any feature of any microcontroller in the system as if all of the features were located in the same component.

Now, I’m a hardware design engineer by trade, so the software side is a bit outside my bailiwick, but — even so — looking at the video above and scanning the documentation makes me sit up and say, “Wow, this looks really, really cool.”

I asked around a few of my embedded systems software developer friends, and no one had heard of Luos, but I have a feeling that this may be a tool that’s poised to make a big splash. All sorts of ideas are currently bouncing around my head, like the fact that the Tracealyzer tool from Percepio would make an ideal companion for the Luos OS (see also The 2021 Embedded Online Conference Approacheth).

How about you? Have you heard of Luos? If so, what are your thoughts? If not, and if you lean toward the software side of things, it would be great if you could take a look with your highly trained eye, see what you think, and report back to the rest of us in the comments below.