Congratulations on the LTS release! Thank you very much to all contributors and to the team at Open Robotics!
Micro-ROS uses the ROS 2 stack to bridge the gap between powerful microprocessors and embedded microcontrollers (MCU). The two major goals:
- Integrate the different types of computing platforms seamlessly
- Ease the portability of ROS code to microcontrollers
Due to the well-designed abstractions in the ROS 2 stack, the rmw and rcl layers may be basically used unchanged on MCUs. On the middleware level, the upcoming DDS-XRCE standard allows the communication from and with MCUs at only a few tens of kilobytes of RAM.
Although micro-ROS started as a joint endeavor by five companies/institutions eProsima, Acutronic Robotics, ŁUKASIEWICZ - PIAP Institute, Bosch, and FIWARE Foundation in the context of a European project, we strive to incorporate the ROS community as early as possible. Join the ROS 2 Embedded SIG to learn more!
As a first community use-case, we brought micro-ROS to an STM32 F4 and created a tiny demo using the Kobuki Turtlebot 2 with it.
Check it out at https://github.com/micro-ROS/micro-ROS_kobuki_demo/.
Further use-cases with a modular manipulator, a lawnmower robot, integration of a drone autopilot, and robot operating in smart warehouse will be developed and demonstrated in the next 18 months.
We have also prepared another small demonstration. In this case, we show a micro-ROS temperature publisher.
Check the next video to see how it works: