Micro-ROS Project Brings ROS 2 to the Arduino IDE and CLI Through an Experimental Library Release
Initial release supports the OpenCR 1.0, Teensy 3.2, and Teensy 4.0/4.1 development boards.
The micro-ROS project, which offers the Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2) for microcontrollers, has launched an experimental library for the Arduino IDE or command line interface.
"Lately," Francesca Finocchiaro writes in the announcement, "more and more users, partners, and community members have been gently hinting at a possible and desirable integration of the mostly famous Arduino, an IDE designed to fit into extremely resource-constrained devices, with micro-ROS, given its special talent to implant ROS 2 nodes into MCU-operated sensors and actuators."
"Based on this and on our recent release of straight-to-the-bone micro-ROS standalone library + header files, which was already successfully integrated with the ESP-IDF and Zephyr build system, we were able to give support to the Arduino IDE."
The initial release, described as experimental, supports three main Arduino-compatible boards: the OpenCR 1.0, the Teensy 3.2, and the Teensy 4.0 and 4.1, "with the latter being especially appealing," Finocchiaro notes, "in that it’s the first MCU that works at 600MHz."
"This software is not ready for production use," its maintainers note. "It has neither been developed nor tested for a specific use case. However, the license conditions of the applicable open source licenses allow you to adapt the software to your needs. Before using it in a safety relevant setting, make sure that the software fulfills your requirements and adjust it according to any applicable safety standards, e.g., ISO 26262."
The release and source code can be found on a dedicated GitHub repository, under the Apache License.