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Blog posts tagged
"robotics"


Canonical
13 June 2019

Customisable for the enterprise: the next-generation of drones

Internet of Things Article

Drones, and their wide-ranging uses, have been a constant topic of conversation for some years now, but we’re only just beginning to move away from the hypothetical and into reality. The FAA estimates that there will be 2 million drones in the United States alone in 2019, as adoption within the likes of distribution, construction, ...


Sarah Dickinson
7 June 2019

Small Robot Company sows the seeds for autonomous and more profitable farming

Internet of Things Article

In Europe, the cost of running a cereal farm – cultivating wheat, rice, and other grains – has risen by 85% in the last 25 years, yet crop yields and revenues have stagnated. And while farms struggle to remain profitable, it won’t be long before those static yields become insufficient to support growing populations. Reliance ...


Kyle Fazzari
9 April 2019

Speed up your ROS snap builds

Internet of Things Article

A while back I wrote a post about distributing a ROS system among multiple snaps. If you want to enable some sort of add-on story, you need to have multiple snaps, and that remains the way to do it today with ROS. That approach works, but I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not ...


Kyle Fazzari
11 March 2019

ROS 2 launch: required nodes

Cloud and server Article

When using the Robot Operating System (ROS), it’s fairly common to want to shut down a launched system if a specific node (or set of nodes) exits. This is pretty easy in ROS1, because launch files support the required attribute on each node. As a result, crafting a two-node system where one of the nodes ...


Kyle Fazzari
28 February 2019

Building ROS 2 snaps with Colcon

Internet of Things Article

The snapcraft CLI has supported building ROS1 snaps for a while via the catkin plugin. We supported the ROS2 betas via the ament plugin, but that was before Open Robotics had a ROS2 package repository setup, which meant that the ament plugin built the ROS2 underlay from source, and it was predictably dreadfully slow. However, ...


Eric Jensen
15 February 2019

The forecast is robots

Internet of Things Article

Robots are an increasingly important part of our lives, in more ways than we realise. I’m not talking just about Roombas, or the toy robots that inhabit the wish lists of the world’s children (and the young at heart). Robots are increasingly behind the scenes, powering the modern world we experience daily. From clothing to ...


Sarah Dickinson
9 January 2019

Apellix engineers safer work environments with Ubuntu powered aerial robotics

Internet of Things Article

In 2016, 16% of all workplace deaths in the US were attributed to falls. Apellix, a Florida-based start up, who specialise in aerial robotics aims to reduce this number by using their drones in place of workers to complete tasks in elevated or dangerous environments. In tandem, these same aerial robotics can also reduce the ...


Guest
3 December 2018

Collaborative robots – Cobots and the changing nature of work

Internet of Things Article

  This is a guest blog by Jamie Branch, Corrosion Engineer at Apellix.  Collaborative robots, or cobots, work side by side with humans to enhance human worker’s ability to perform their job safer, with less monotony and repetitive tasks. Most of us are familiar with industrial robots and it should be no surprise that people ...


James Nunns
13 September 2018

Robots that run Ubuntu

Internet of Things Article

The home for innovators, Ubuntu is a place where developers can create what previously lived solely in the realms of fiction. The internet of things, the cloud, and robots are world changing technologies and they’re all running Ubuntu. With an estimated worldwide spending figure of $103bn by 2020, according to IDC, the field of robotics ...


Sarah Dickinson
18 May 2018

Creating the world’s first robotic tennis ball collector with Ubuntu

Internet of Things Article

From manufacturing plants to homes, robots have become a staple in the modern world for making life easier. This ability to boost convenience is what the startup company, Tennibot, is looking to bring to tennis courts around the world. Tennibot is the world’s first robotic tennis ball collector, or alternatively, an autonomous ball boy.  ...


Sarah Dickinson
16 April 2018

BotsAndUs build a social robot on Ubuntu

Internet of Things Article

As robotics become increasingly prevalent in all sectors and expand outside the manufacturing industry, it is no surprise that IDC predicts worldwide spending on robotics to reach $103bn in 2018. A UK based startup, BotsAndUs, are looking to capitalise on this opportunity and have created an advanced social robot – Bo – primarily for use ...


Kyle Fazzari
16 March 2018

Your first robot: Sharing with others [5/5]

Desktop Article

This is the fifth (and final) blog post in this series about creating your first robot with ROS and Ubuntu Core. In the previous post we discussed methods of control, did a little math, and wrote the ROS driver for our robot. But it still required several nodes to be running at once, and sharing ...