Category: Open Source

Developing autonomous robots is hard. Because it requires both hardware and software to be developed, integrated and tested, doing so in a physical environment is difficult and costly. Using simulations, robot developers can test their code quickly, iterating many times before finally deploying software to the hardware for testing in the real world. Having a […]

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.

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.

Earlier this year, we held the AWS JPL Open Source Rover Challenge, a four-month competition where participants from around the world used deep reinforcement learning to drive digital robot models on a virtual Mars landscape. Participants created autonomous navigation models for the robot and trained them in AWS RoboMaker simulation. The virtual robot used in […]

The S3 rosbag cloud extension enables customers to easily configure and record data from robots as rosbags, and upload them to Amazon S3, which they can later use to analyze events, troubleshoot existing applications, and provide as inputs to AWS RoboMaker log-based simulation for regression. In this blog, we will review three ROS nodes in the S3 rosbag cloud extension that create and upload rosbag files from the robot to Amazon S3, with hands-on examples of how to use the nodes.