RT-Thread

An open-source embedded real-time operating system developed by a team in China.

RT-Thread is an open-source embedded real-time operating system (RTOS — a system that guarantees a task gets a response within a set time) led and maintained by the Shanghai company RT-Thread (Ruixinde Electronics). The project started in 2006 and is now licensed under Apache 2.0. It comes in a standard edition with a driver framework, file system, network stack, and package ecosystem; a Nano edition for microcontrollers with very limited resources; and a Smart edition for processors with a memory management unit, supporting architectures including ARM Cortex-M and RISC-V. In robotics, it commonly runs on microcontrollers such as joint drive boards, sensor boards, and chassis controllers, handling hard-real-time jobs like motor control and bus communication, working alongside a host computer running Linux and ROS; its niche is similar to FreeRTOS's.

ExampleUse an STM32 as a wheeled base's control board: run threads on RT-Thread for 1 kHz motor control and CAN communication, then send odometry over a serial link to a host computer running ROS 2.

Also called

RT-Thread Nano, RT-Thread Smart

Related

Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) · FreeRTOS · Microcontroller Unit (MCU) · STMicroelectronics STM32 MCU Family · Embedded System · Lower-Level Controller

Sources

RT-Thread 官网 (Chinese)
RT-Thread/rt-thread (GitHub)