Robotics

dragan-s
30 August 2019

Building a better TurtleBot3

Article Robotics

TurtleBot3 was released in 2017 and is positioned as a low-cost, open-source robot kit. For new owners of the TurtleBot3, there are various resources online that will assist you with building your brand new TurtleBot3 out of the box. One such example is the official TurtleBot3 instructional video. While it is a great video to

dragan-s
30 August 2019

Kyle Fazzari
28 August 2019

Canonical joins the ROS 2 Technical Steering Committee

Article Internet of Things

We at Canonical care deeply about robotics. We firmly believe that robots based on Linux are cheaper to develop, more flexible, more secure, and faster to market. One of the contributing factors to this being the case is the Robot Operating System (ROS). ROS is by far the most popular middleware for creating...

Kyle Fazzari
28 August 2019

Jeremie Deray
27 August 2019

Components vs. Plugins in ROS 2

Article Robotics

After our series of post about ROS 2 CLI tools (1, 2), we continue exploring the ROS 2 realm taking a look at ROS 2 components and more specifically, how they compare to plugins. spoiler alert: Long story short, components are plugins. Short story long? Is that a thing? Well plugins and components are indeed

Jeremie Deray
27 August 2019

Ted Kern
21 August 2019

How to add a linter to ROS 2

Article Internet of Things

A well configured linter can catch common errors before code is even run or compiled. ROS 2 makes it easy to add linters of your choice and make them part of your package’s testing pipeline. We’ll step through the process, from start to finish, of adding a linter to ament so it can be used

Ted Kern
21 August 2019

Ted Kern
15 August 2019

Linting ROS 2 Packages with mypy

Article Internet of Things

One of the most common complaints from developers moving into large Python codebases is the difficulty in figuring out type information, and the ease by which type mismatch errors can appear at runtime. Python 3.5 added support for a type annotation system, described in PEP 484. Python 3.6+ expands this with individual...

Ted Kern
15 August 2019

Jeremie Deray
7 August 2019

Creating a ROS 2 CLI command and verb

Article Robotics

Following our previous post on ROS 2 CLI (Command Line Interface), we will see here how one can extend the set of existing CLI tools by introducing a new command and its related verb(s). As support for this tutorial, we will create a ‘Hello World’ example so that the new command will be hello and

Jeremie Deray
7 August 2019

Jeremie Deray
21 June 2019

ROS 2 Command Line Interface

Article Robotics

Disclosure: read the post until the end, a surprise awaits you! Moving from ROS 1 to ROS 2 can be a little overwhelming.It is a lot of (new) concepts, tools and a large codebase to get familiar with. And just like many of you, I am getting started with ROS 2. One of the central

Jeremie Deray
21 June 2019

alfonsosanchezbeato
18 June 2019

Your first robotic arm with Ubuntu Core, coming from Niryo

Article Ubuntu

Niryo has built a fantastic 6-axis robotic arm called ‘Niryo One’. It is a 3D-printed, affordable robotic arm focused mainly on educational purposes. Additionally, it is fully open source and based on ROS. On the hardware side, it is powered by a Raspberry Pi 3 and NiryoStepper motors, based on Arduino microcontrollers....

alfonsosanchezbeato
18 June 2019

Canonical
13 June 2019

Customisable for the enterprise: the next-generation of drones

Article Internet of Things

Drones, and their wide-ranging uses, have been a constant topic of conversation for some years now, but we’re only just beginning to move away from the hypothetical and into reality. The FAA estimates that there will be 2 million drones in the United States alone in 2019, as adoption within the likes of distribution,...

Canonical
13 June 2019

Sarah Dickinson
7 June 2019

Small Robot Company sows the seeds for autonomous and more profitable farming

Article Internet of Things

In Europe, the cost of running a cereal farm – cultivating wheat, rice, and other grains – has risen by 85% in the last 25 years, yet crop yields and revenues have stagnated. And while farms struggle to remain profitable, it won’t be long before those static yields become insufficient to support growing populations. Reliance

Sarah Dickinson
7 June 2019

Kyle Fazzari
9 April 2019

Speed up your ROS snap builds

Article Internet of Things

A while back I wrote a post about distributing a ROS system among multiple snaps. If you want to enable some sort of add-on story, you need to have multiple snaps, and that remains the way to do it today with ROS. That approach works, but I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not

Kyle Fazzari
9 April 2019

Kyle Fazzari
11 March 2019

ROS 2 launch: required nodes

Article Cloud and server

When using the Robot Operating System (ROS), it’s fairly common to want to shut down a launched system if a specific node (or set of nodes) exits. This is pretty easy in ROS1, because launch files support the required attribute on each node. As a result, crafting a two-node system where one of the nodes

Kyle Fazzari
11 March 2019

Kyle Fazzari
28 February 2019

Building ROS 2 snaps with Colcon

Article Internet of Things

The snapcraft CLI has supported building ROS1 snaps for a while via the catkin plugin. We supported the ROS2 betas via the ament plugin, but that was before Open Robotics had a ROS2 package repository setup, which meant that the ament plugin built the ROS2 underlay from source, and it was predictably dreadfully slow. However,

Kyle Fazzari
28 February 2019

Eric Jensen
15 February 2019

The forecast is robots

Article Internet of Things

Robots are an increasingly important part of our lives, in more ways than we realise. I’m not talking just about Roombas, or the toy robots that inhabit the wish lists of the world’s children (and the young at heart). Robots are increasingly behind the scenes, powering the modern world we experience daily. From clothing to

Eric Jensen
15 February 2019

Whether you're starting in the lab or already in production, Canonical can help manage the complexity of the open source software underpinning your robot's brains and personality.

Whether you're starting in the lab or already in production,
Canonical can help manage the complexity of the open source software
underpinning your robot's brains and personality.