Open Source Robotics Challenges is a series of blogs that will share guidelines and advice for open source companies to overcome market barriers. We will touch on topics regularly raised by companies in our open source community such as security awareness, prototyping strategies, safety architecture, adoption and more.
Together we have reached the end. Two partners, two allies, two distributions that supported millions of innovators have reached their end-of-life (EOL). April will be remembered as the month where ROS Kinetic and Ubuntu Xenial reached EOL. ROS Kinetic is one of the most used, widely deployed and extensively contributed ROS distributions (1st with 1233 repos in ros/rosdistro). Released in 2016, it supported newer related components, notably Gazebo 7 and OpenCV 3, and this month has reached its end.
It’s never too late to learn. As any reinforcement learning agent, we get rewarded by the new knowledge that we acquire. Likewise, we learn by doing, by rolling up our sleeves and getting to work. (Do you want a hands-on book on Reinforcement Learning? Here is my personal favourite) March has shown us great examples of this. From robots learning to encourage social participation to detect serious environmental problems, it was a learning month.
Canonical ROS ESM customers now can access a long-term supported ROS and Ubuntu environment by the Ubuntu and ROS experts. Learn more about ROS ESM. 6 April 2021: Canonical and Open Robotics announced today a partnership for Robot Operating System (ROS) Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) and enterprise support, as part of Ubuntu Advantage, Canonical’s service package for Ubuntu. ROS support will be made available as an option to Ubuntu Advantage support customers.
And that was February! A month where a rover showed what perseverance means and a small drone what ingenuity looks like. February will be remembered as the month where two robots landed on Mars, telling us all to “dare mighty things”.
Goodbye Thanksgiving (well, for some of us), hello Christmas! The holiday season really is the best, and it always brings interesting robotics news, which we will now distill into a quick dose of delightful and easily-digestible tidbits. As always, if you’d like to see your work showcased here, please send an email to robotics.community@canonical.com, and we’ll feature it in next month’s blog.
Our simple ROS 2 talker and listener setup runs well on a single Kubernetes node, now let’s distribute it out across multiple computers. This article builds upon our simple ROS 2 talker / listener setup by running it on multiple K8s nodes. At the completion of this setup expect to have a ROS2 Kubernetes cluster running MicroK8s on three different machines. Applying a single configuration file distributes the ROS 2 workload across the machines.
This post marks the one year anniversary of the Ubuntu Robotics newsletter. We knew adding the year on the end of each title was a good idea! One full year where the Ubuntu Robotics team have been documenting their work, showcasing projects in ROS and discussing interesting things going on in the community. And my, what a year it has been. To mark the occasion, we’d love to hear and write about any work you’ve done in robotics or ROS over the last year.
The myriad of different fields that make up robotics makes QA practices difficult to settle on. Field testing is the go-to, since a functioning robot is often proof enough that a system is working. But online tests are slow. The physical environment must be set up. The entire system has to be in a workable state. Multiple runs are needed to build confidence. This grinds development to a halt.
So that’s the summer gone (hopefully, that heat was awful). Or winter if that’s where you are. Seasons change and so does the state of robotics. Fortunately, that’s what we’re here for. Before we get into it, as ever, If you’re working on any robotics projects that you’d like us to talk about, be sure to get in touch.
