SIG Coordinator: TBD

Goals:

• Bring native ROS communication to low-resource devices
• Bring standard ROS to ARM processors

Members:

• Tully Foote
• Morgan Quigley
• Christian Holl
• Marcus Liebhardt
• Nikolai Ensslen
• Gonçalo Cabrita
• Anthony Lucente
• Paul Mathieu

Mailing list:

• Discourse Category: https://discourse.ros.org/c/embedded

• Deprecated archive: https://groups.google.com/group/ros-sig-embedded

Definitions

• "Embedded"
  • Devices: ARM Cortex A (32bit), Intel Atom (64bit)
  • Capable of running standard ROS (roscpp, roscore)
• "Small Embedded"
  • Devices: ARM Cortex M (32bit), AVR (8-32bit), XMOS (32bit)
  • Requires light-weight ROS implementation (µROSnode, rosc) or ROS proxies (rosserial, rosbridge)

Implemented new features

ROS on Embedded

• A widely-applicable cross-compile tool chain for ROS packages using the OpenEmbedded/Yocto infrastructure

Proposed new features

ROS on ARM

• armhf deb packages for Raspbian
  • A ROS repository for Raspbian will be created with binary packages that will be installed with a simple 'apt-get install', in the same fashion as it is done in a Ubuntu PC
• armhf deb packages
• Improvements to catkin: support building for armhf (ARMv6+VFPv2 / ARMv7-A+Thumb-2+VFPv3D16)
• Cross-compile instructions for ARM

ROS on Small Embedded devices

• Earlier solutions

  • rosserial - general protocol for sending ROS messages over serial links

  • rosbridge_suite - a JSON API to ROS functionality for non-ROS programs

• New solutions since this SIG

  • µROSnode - Lightweight ROS client in ANSI C

  • rosc - A portable, dependency-free ROS client library in pure C

Meetings

• ROS for Products Workshop (Mountain View, 6-7 Feb 2013)

• ROS Industrial & Products Meeting after ROSCon 2013 (Stuttgart, 12 May 2013)

Deadlines