IROS2022 talk: "RoboStack - taking the horror out of ROS" (IEEE RAM contribution)

This video accompanies our IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine article "A RoboStack Tutorial: Using the Robot Operating System Alongside the Conda and Jupyter Data Science Ecosystems". It was recorded for the presentation of this article at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2022).

Paper link: https://doi.org/10.1109/MRA.2021.3128367

Authors: Tobias Fischer, Wolf Vollprecht, Silvio Traversaro, Sean Yen, Carlos Herrero, and Michael Milford

RoboStack tightly couples the widely-used Robot Operating System with Conda, a cross-platform, language-agnostic package manager, and Jupyter, a web-based interactive computational environment affording scientific computing. RoboStack provides new ROS packages for Conda, enabling the installation of ROS alongside data-science and machine-learning packages with ease. Multiple ROS versions (currently ROS1 Melodic and Noetic as well as ROS2 Foxy, Galactic and Humble) can run simultaneously on one machine, with pre-compiled binaries available for Linux, Windows and OSX, and the ARM architecture (e.g. the Raspberry Pi and the new Apple Silicon). To deal with the large size of the ROS ecosystem, we significantly improved the speed of the Conda solver and build system by rewriting the crucial parts in C++. We further contribute a collection of JupyterLab extensions for ROS, including plugins for live plotting, debugging and robot control, as well as tight integration with Zethus, an RViz like visualization tool. Taken together, RoboStack combines the best of the data-science and robotics worlds to help researchers and developers to build custom solutions for their academic and industrial projects.