12 posts tagged with "robotics"

This is a crucial question when deciding whether to use the cloud at all for robotics development, let alone how much to use it. Why connect my robots to the cloud at all? What benefits does it bring me, and what trade-offs am I making in order to use the cloud? This post is all about the why, rather than the how.

If you want the short answer, here it is: you should use the cloud if you ever plan to scale your robot fleet past around 10 robots, and if you do intend to scale up, integrate with the cloud as early as possible to avoid integration pains. If you're never intending to scale that much, the cloud can still be of use, but it depends on your use case as to whether the benefits outweigh the costs.

If you're not convinced, read on! The rest of this post is explaining my statement above.

This post is about connecting ROS2 robots to the cloud with a quick and simple Greengrass setup. I'll guide you through building a sample component that can be hosted on a server connected to your robot fleet, which will connect the robots to AWS IoT Core without modifying the robot software in any way. Setup requires installing only a few prerequisites. Let's see how it works!

This post is also available in video form, if you want to follow along:

Simulators such as Gazebo, NVIDIA Isaac Sim, and O3DE are incredibly helpful tools when it comes to robotics development. Robots are very slow and expensive to develop, and a large part of the reason is not being able to test how the robot works for real because of how slow it is to set up and run tests. With simulations, we can repeatedly run a robot through exactly the same setup every time to see how it behaves, allowing us to more quickly modify the robot software and run it again.

There's one issue - the more realistic the simulation, the more powerful the computer needed to run it. That's where the cloud comes in; instead of buying the hardware outright and running the computer in-house, you can run simulations on demand in the cloud, and only pay for the server while you're using it!

In this post, I'll show you how to run a multi-robot sample simulation using O3DE in the cloud, using an on-demand EC2 instance with graphics hardware available. If you'd like to follow along, this post is also available in video form using the link below:

Congratulations! You have a whole lab full of robots running your latest software. Now you want to start looking at an overall view of your robots. It's time to build a fleet overview, and this post will show you how to use Fleet Indexing from AWS IoT Device Management to start your overview.

Fleet Indexing is a feature of AWS IoT Core that collects and indexes information about all of your selected Things and allows you to execute queries on them and aggregate data about them. For example, you can check which of your Things are online, giving you an easy way to determine which of your robots are connected.

I want to walk you through this process and show you what it looks like in the console and using Command Line Interface (CLI) commands. We'll be using the sample code from aws-iot-robot-connectivity-samples-ros2, but I've forked it to add some helper scripts that make setup a little easier for multiple robots. It also adds a launch script so multiple robots can be launched at the same time.

This guide is also available in video form - see the link below!

This post is to show how to set up the Boston Dynamics Spot SDK.

If you prefer a video format, or you want to see the samples in action, check out my YouTube video below:

This post is to give you my five tops on how to stand out as a Software Engineer. These are tips that will help at any career level, not just when you're starting out.

If you prefer a video format, check out my YouTube video below:

This post is about how to build an AWS Step Functions state machine and how you can use it to interact with IoT edge devices. In this case, we are sending a smoothie order to a "robot" and waiting for it to make that smoothie.

The state machine works by chaining together a series of Lambda functions and defining how data should be passed between them (if you're not sure about Lambda function, take a look at this blog post!). There's also a step where the state machine needs to wait for the smoothie to be made, which is slightly more complicated - we'll cover that later in this post.

This post is also available in video form - check the video link below if you want to follow along!

This is the second part of the "ROS2 Control with the JetBot" series, where I show you how to get a JetBot working with ROS2 Control! This is a sequel to the part 1 blog post, where I showed how to drive the JetBot's motors using I²C and PWM with code written in C++.

In this post, I show the next step in making ROS2 Control work with the WaveShare JetBot - wrapping the motor control code in a System. I'll walk through some concepts, show the example repository for ROS2 Control implementations, and then show how to implement the System for JetBot and see it running.

This post is also available in video form - check the video link below if you want to follow along!

This post shows how to build two simple functions, running in the cloud, using AWS Lambda. The purpose of these functions is the same - to update the status of a given robot name in a database, allowing us to view the current statuses in the database or build tools on top of it. This is one way we could coordinate robots in one or more fleets - using the cloud to store the state and run the logic to co-ordinate those robots.

This post is also available in video form - check the video link below if you want to follow along!

This post is all about my advice on getting started as a Robotics Software Engineer. I want to tell you a little of my journey to get to this point, then what you should do to practise and give yourself the best start possible.

If you prefer a video format, check out my YouTube video below: