ROS 2 on iPAD?

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Has anyone put Ros 2 on an iPad? Anyone want to share step-by-step directions?

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What are you trying to accomplish? If you want to use the iPad for remotely monitoring or controlling the robot, then you don’t want to put ROS 2 itself on the iPad. There are better options, e.g., Remote Teleop | Transitive Robotics for teleop, or ROS Tool | Transitive Robotics for a front-end (React) SDK for interacting with ROS on your robot.

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I heard that it is possible to install ROS 2 on modern macOS systems via Anaconda, likely using RoboStack, thanks to the availability of arm64 builds. However, I haven’t heard of any ready-made, drop-in solutions for running ROS 2 on iOS devices.

As mentioned above, if you are trying to create a teleop remote, you might have a better development experience with PC gaming handhelds, e.g. the Steam Deck runs SteamOS (based on Arch Linux), where you can deploy containers with your project.

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As others have said, it’s more important how you want to use ros2 on the ipad before you just install it. Installing ros2 on the ipad is quite a solvable problem. For example, you can install a linux virtual machine on the Ipad and then install ros2 in it. Another possibility is to use the nix-ros-overlay. If you really want to do that, you can. The why is really more important.

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It’s quite unlikely you can install a virtual machine on an iPad, I’m sure good old Apple doesn’t like tinkering with their devices at that level.

@BobH A very long time ago I ported ROS 2 to run natively on iOS (GitHub - esteve/ros2_objc: Objective C and iOS bindings for ROS2), so that for example, you could publish the data coming from its sensors as ROS 2 topics. I no longer have the time to work on that, but let me know if you’re interested and I’ll be happy to guide you through the process.

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