FreeRTOS

A small open-source real-time operating system kernel that runs on microcontrollers.

FreeRTOS is an open-source real-time operating system (RTOS — an OS that guarantees tasks respond within a set deadline) kernel first released by Richard Barry around 2003, taken over by Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2017, and released under the MIT license. It's extremely small, able to run on microcontrollers with only tens of kilobytes of memory, and provides basic facilities like task scheduling, queues, semaphores, and timers, letting a developer split motor control, sensor reading, and communication into several tasks that run by priority. Lower-level boards on a robot — motor driver boards, IMU boards, dexterous-hand controller boards — commonly run it; Espressif's official ESP32 development framework is also built on FreeRTOS, and micro-ROS supports it as well.

ExampleOn an STM32 joint driver board, FreeRTOS sets up three tasks: a 1 kHz current-loop task, a CAN-communication task for receiving commands, and a low-priority temperature-monitoring task.

Related

Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) · Microcontroller Unit (MCU) · STMicroelectronics STM32 MCU Family · micro-ROS · Embedded System · RT-Thread

Sources

FreeRTOS 官网 (Chinese)
FreeRTOS/FreeRTOS-Kernel (GitHub)