Hi Framework Community 
, we’re Purdue Lunabotics, a student robotics organization with a focus on autonomy! We compete annually in the NASA Lunabotics challenge, which places a robot into lunar terrain and requires excavating said lunar regolith, traversing through it, and depositing it at a designated location.
All of these tasks are intended to be performed fully autonomously. Once a run starts, we are not able to send commands to the robot if we want to maintain our autonomy points. Because of this, we need a robust simulation to do significant testing before we end up at competition, to test algorithms, added features, and overall architectures.
With our Framework laptops, many members whose computers would not be powerful enough to run our simulation software are able to test and verify their code. Having the ability to run our full simulation at full speed is critical to verify interactions, which is often something infeasible on other laptops. We often see a performance boost from 4% real time up to 99% real time just from using our Framework laptops versus personal laptops.
This severely impacts development time, as testing being more time intensive means individual members have less time to research and develop. This inefficiency is aided by the fact that many members need to go through WSL or a VM to run our simulation software. This is not needed when using Framework laptops due to their support for Linux, which we use on our team laptops.
Our software stack is primarily ROS, a subsystem intended to make robotics development easier. It heavily encourages Linux usage, and paired with our system’s own requirements and interactions, we need our members to interact with our system through a Linux kernel. With Framework’s native support for Linux systems, we do not need to worry about bugs or incompatibilities resulting from adding another layer of virtualization software.
Some of these incompatibilities are quite critical, including being unable to connect USB devices to send commands to our robot, which we do through game controllers. Due to all of the communication with our robot being wireless, being able to test networking accurately is helpful to verify that our runs do not get restricted with technical issues of connectivity. Having team laptops thanks in part to Framework’s generous support allows us to make sure every member who would like to help develop our software is not limited by their own device.
Over 70% of our current software team uses Framework laptops for their personal devices as well. Having modular IO allows us to be very versatile in what we can have connected. Being able to switch between multiple Ethernet adapters, more storage, or just more USB-A connectors helps us test out new hardware and iterate faster. We’re also able to switch modules between personal computers and team computers, which is especially helpful when sharing data files from our robot’s runs that are often in the tens of gigabytes.
Specifically with our team’s computers, we have two Framework 13’s. The high brightness matte screen is very helpful in outdoor environments, like our test pit. Considering that we regularly test for full days, not needing to worry about glare or being unable to see our windows is an appreciated feature. Each Framework 13 having a compatible chassis means we can easily upgrade our hardware without needing to get accustomed to new screens and keyboards.
As we upgrade our simulations to make them more representative of the real world, we require more computing power, and allowing our devices to visually look the same while having better performance decreases confusion with subtle muscle memory shifts.
In general, Framework laptops have been extremely helpful to our team. The customizability paired with powerful compute and performance makes them a perfect laptop brand for our team. Framework’s mentality for repairability and development aligns closely with our team’s core philosophy, and we are proud to be sponsored by them!
Thank you for reading, and I hope this was a bit insightful as to how students are taking advantage of Framework products!
