Sugarcoat 🍬


Sugarcoat 🍬#

Sugarcoat 🍬 provides a whole lot of syntactic sugar for creating multi-node ROS2 event-driven systems and management using an intuitive Python API.

Overview#

Sugarcoat is built for ROS2 developers who want to create robust, event-driven systems with multiple nodes that are easy to use and can be configured and started with an intuitive python API. It provides primitives for writing ROS nodes and events/actions which can start/stop/modify the nodes, in the spirit of event driven software standard. Sugarcoat is also a replacement for the ROS Launch API.

A Component is the main execution unit in Sugarcoat, each component is configured with Inputs/Outputs and Fallback behaviors. Additionally, each component updates its own Health Status, to keep track of the well/mal functioning of the component. Components can be handled and reconfigured dynamically at runtime using Events and Actions. Events, Actions and Components are passed to the Launcher which runs the set of components as using multi-threaded or multi-process execution. The Launcher also uses an internal Monitor to keep track of the components and monitor events.

component

Component Structure#

component

Component Structure#

multi-threaded

Multi-threaded execution#

multi-threaded

Multi-threaded execution#

multi-process

Multi-process execution#

multi-process

Multi-process execution#

Packages created using Sugarcoat#

  • Kompass: a framework for building robust and comprehensive event-driven navigation stacks using an easy-to-use and intuitive Python API

  • EmbodiedAgents: a fully-loaded framework for creating interactive embodied agents that can understand, remember, and act upon contextual information from their environment.

Installation#

Install python dependencies using pip as follows:

pip install 'attrs>=23.2.0' numpy-quaternion

For ROS versions >= ‘humble’, you can install Sugarcoat with your package manager. For example on Ubuntu:

sudo apt install ros-$ROS_DISTRO-automatika-ros-sugar

Alternatively, grab your favorite deb package from the release page and install it as follows:

sudo dpkg -i ros-$ROS_DISTRO-automatica-ros-sugar_$version$DISTRO_$ARCHITECTURE.deb

Building from source#

mkdir -p ros-sugar-ws/src
cd ros-sugar-ws/src
git clone https://github.com/automatika-robotics/sugarcoat && cd ..
pip install numpy opencv-python-headless 'attrs>=23.2.0' jinja2 msgpack msgpack-numpy numpy-quaternion setproctitle pyyaml toml
colcon build
source install/setup.bash

Contributions#

Sugarcoat has been developed in collaboration between Automatika Robotics and Inria. Contributions from the community are most welcome.

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