micro-ROS on Arduino Portenta H7

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Find out the new entry to the family of the micro-ROS officially supported boards: the Arduino Portenta H7!

We completed the port to this board in parallel with our collaborator @lukicdarkoo.

Soon after, we were able to try it on a device coming directly from the manufacturer, Massimo Banzi, who suggested that it would be a “great addition” to have micro-ROS running on it :blush:

Pros of using this board?
The H7 includes two processors that can run tasks in parallel and share all the in-chip peripherals. The main processor is the dual core STM32H747, including a Cortex M7 running at 480 MHz, and a Cortex M4 running at 240 MHz.

It makes a good pair with the Portenta Vision Shield, a camera-equipped hardware add-on enriching the H7 with cool possibilities such as to run embedded computer vision applications, or to connect to the Arduino Cloud. Given that the Portenta can easily support processes created with TensorFlow Lite, this implies that it could potentially be computing a computer vision algorithm at the same time as carrying out low-level operations like controlling a motor or a sensor, or acting as a user interface.

And now, thanks to the little turtle, all this can be directly integrated with the ROS 2 ecosystem!

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At the moment, micro-ROS on the H7 supports Serial transport only. However, with the onboard wireless module, it will be possible to use it with WiFi in the near future.

Cons?
We don’t see any :wink:

Hopefully, we’ll soon witness a cool demo involving micro-ROS and the Portenta H7 boosted by the Vision Shield!

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We have added WiFi to the transports supported by micro-ROS on the Arduino Portenta H7!

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This builds upon the already outstanding news of the primordial port accomplished over the wired Serial (UART) and Serial-USB connections.

This is great news for the small turtle, as, until recently, most ports did not support wireless connection (namely, before this, we only had the Client running over WiFi on the ESP32, and over 6LoWPAN on the Olimex LTD STM32-E407 - check out relevant applications here and here).
Moreover, the fact that the fortunate bearer of such a convenient transport is the Portenta paves the way for timely and profitable integrations, such as the one with the freshly announced ROBOTIS DYNAMIXEL Shield.

Find here an example on how to program a micro-ROS application on the Portenta using WiFi.

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Awesome! I can imagine creating a baby turtle with these combination.
Thanks for including a simple Arduino example :+1:

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@FraFin Thanks for the great work!.
I just discovered the “Portenta Machine Control” and wondered if there are any plans to integrate it as well?

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Hey @alorcamo, AFAIK Portenta Machine Control has the same chipset as Arduino Portenta so it should be compatible with micro-ROS for Arduino.

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As I understand, it is only one servo? right?

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Hello Ros community

I connected the Portenta H7 with micro-Ros trough USB with no problems, now, I would like to do it trough WiFi, but there are only tutorials for esp32, should I just use those tutorials for esp32?

Thanks!

Ricardo