Back in the mists of time when Visionscape® was being developed, the software engineering team made the decision to use a somewhat obscure real time operating system (RTOS) called VxWorks from a company called Wind River. VxWorks was used on the original Visionscape vision engine frame grabbers and on the RVSI HawkEye® 1500 readers and HawkEye® 1600 smart cameras (now the Microscan VS-1 Smart Camera).

What caught my eye back in early 2004 while we were busy introducing the HawkEye 1500 reader to the world was that NASA had chosen to use the same operating system on the two Mars rovers that bounced down (literally) onto the surface of the Red Planet in January 2004. You may remember the high level of interest in the longevity and activity of the two rovers (Spirit and Opportunity) that were designed for a 90-day life on Mars, but which kept on roving away well beyond their design lifetimes.

It did not take much imagination to incorporate this information into our product presentations and training materials. In fact I produced a very amateur “Photoshop” graphic (which is fortunately lost) of one of the Mars rovers toting a HE1500 at the end of its robot arm.

Rolling on nearly 10 years and one of the “Class of 2003” rovers (Opportunity) is still wandering very slowly around a Martian crater and sending back data, having exceeded its design life by a factor of 30.


It came as no surprise to learn that the Mars Science Laboratory (aka the Curiosity rover) delivered another copy of VxWorks to Mars when it landed (quite gently) in the Gale crater on August 6th 2012.


Microscan’s latest AutoVISION smart cameras – the Vision MINI and the Vision HAWK – also use VxWorks. It is true to say that NASA, like Microscan, has chosen to remain with a tried and true operating system for mission critical functions.



If you are wondering what is so special about a Real Time Operating System, the answer is that it is designed to have a high level of consistency regarding the time taken to do a particular task. This is achieved by implementing a sophisticated scheduling algorithm that runs tasks according to their priority and a design that has minimum thread switching and interrupt latency. In addition, RTOS’s need to be bullet-proof; Airbus, BMW, and Bombadier (high speed trains) also rely on VxWorks.