Author: Matt Hansen

Introduction ANT61 robotics is a start-up based in Sydney, Australia, that develops autonomous robots for space applications such as in-orbit satellite servicing to avoid putting human lives at risk. Their robots use AI-based control systems that enable them to perform installation and servicing tasks in unpredictable environments where remote control is impossible. In this post, […]

AWS RoboMaker, a service that allows developers to simulate robotics applications at cloud scale, now supports using containers to run any robot and simulation software of their choice, and provides Graphics Processor Unit (GPU) support for high-fidelity simulation. Now, developers can simulate workloads in AWS RoboMaker that require high-fidelity graphics such as autonomous driving and machine learning. In this blog, you will learn how to use new AWS RoboMaker features to test autonomous vehicles in the CARLA autonomous driving simulator, a high-fidelity simulator based on Unreal Engine.

AWS RoboMaker now supports ROS 2 Foxy Fitzroy (Foxy), enabling developers to use Foxy during development or simulation. In ROS 2, Navigation2 (Nav2) is the second generation of the ROS Navigation software stack, enabling robots to move autonomously from point A to B. Nav2 includes new features not previously available in ROS that help developers improve the performance of their robot’s navigation and enables new robotics use cases within logistics, hospitals, or security. In this blog, I review Nav2 features and architecture, and show you how to use Nav2 in AWS RoboMaker.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has released a new Integrated Developer Environment (IDE) desktop feature within AWS RoboMaker. This new feature allows iterative development and testing of your robotics algorithm code through your web browser, speeding up your development time.

AWS RoboMaker released a tool configuration feature that allows customers to improve control of diagnostic tools with their simulations. This new level of control allows users to configure which default tools to run, change the commands used to run them, and add additional tools. In this blog, we walk through two procedures. First, we walk through how to add a configuration to an existing tool and, second, how to add a new tool to your simulation.

Nowadays, risk of spreading disease is a key concern in hospitals, where doctors, nurses and other caregivers are on the front lines helping patients. Hospitals have started using robots in daily operations such as contactless delivery and room disinfection to reduce risk of spreading disease. As the need for robots in healthcare grows, better tools are needed to build, test, and deploy robotics applications quickly and safely. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has developed a Gazebo simulated Hospital World and published it as open source so that robotics companies within the Healthcare industry can more easily test their robots in a simulated hospital environment. In this blog, I will provide an overview of the hospital and share my experience using it to test a PR2 robot, including software failures that I encountered that you may find helpful.

The highly anticipated Robot Operating System 2 distribution Foxy Fitzroy (ROS 2 Foxy) has been released. ROS 2 Foxy is the most secure and reliable ROS distribution to date for production robotics application development. In this blog, we highlight key features and improvements available in this new release.