robotics

I am a staff engineer at Canonical, where I have worked for six years. My time here has been filled with brilliant people and amazing technology, and I’ve had the pleasure and privilege of playing pivotal roles getting a number of new projects off the ground. As I’ve said in the past, I joined Canonical to help my technical growth, and they delivered in spades. I have really loved my time here, which made the decision to leave all the more difficult....

The snapcraft CLI (the tool used to create snaps) has long had support for building snaps that use both ROS 1 and ROS 2. ROS 2 Foxy Fitzroy is the latest ROS 2 LTS, which runs on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). The snapcraft CLI recently gained experimental support for building Foxy snaps, so I wanted to walk you through doing exactly that with the goal of helping both of us: getting you familiar with this new feature, and at the same time getting some mileage on this so as to make it not experimental....

Ubuntu is a very popular operating system for robotics, for a number of reasons. Perhaps the software stack one happens to use prefers Ubuntu, or the hardware one is using only distributes drivers for Ubuntu. Maybe one’s team is already familiar with it, or decision-makers like that it has long-term support releases and extended security maintenance. Perhaps one views snaps as the perfect way to support and update robots in the field, and so on....

UPDATE: I’m leaving this series up for historical purposes, but please note that I no longer recommend Ubuntu Core or snaps for use in robotics. This is the fifth (and final) blog post in this series about creating your first robot with ROS and Ubuntu Core. In the previous post we discussed methods of control, did a little math, and wrote the ROS driver for our robot. But it still required several nodes to be running at once, and sharing it with the world involved uploading your source code somewhere and convincing people to install ROS, build your package, and use it....

UPDATE: I’m leaving this series up for historical purposes, but please note that I no longer recommend Ubuntu Core or snaps for use in robotics. This is the fourth blog post in this series about creating your first robot with ROS and Ubuntu Core. In the previous post we worked on getting data out of the wireless controller and into ROS in a format meant for controlling differential drive robots like ours: the Twist message....