A RoboStack Tutorial: Using the Robot Operating System Alongside the Conda and Jupyter Data Science Ecosystems

We argue that it is beneficial to tightly couple the widely-used Robot Operating System with Conda, a cross-platform, language-agnostic package manager, and Jupyter, web-based interactive computational environment affording scientific computing. provide new ROS packages for enabling installation of alongside data-science machine-learning ease. Multiple versions (currently ROS1 Melodic Noetic, as well ROS2 Foxy Galactic) can run simultaneously on one machine, pre-compiled binaries available Linux, Windows OSX, ARM architecture (e.g. Raspberry Pi Apple Silicon). To deal large size ecosystem, we significantly improved speed Conda solver build system by rewriting crucial parts in C++. further contribute collection JupyterLab extensions ROS, including plugins live plotting, debugging robot control, tight integration Zethus, an RViz like visualization tool. Taken together, RoboStack combines best robotics worlds help researchers developers custom solutions their academic industrial projects.