ROSbloX documentation

Building high-quality, ROS-powered robots with no prior experience about ROS networking and programming?

ROSbloX are your ultimate building blocks for rapidly creating a robot's software stack. They feature plug-and-play connectivity and integrated data visualization.

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About ROSbloX

The Robot Operating System (ROS), https://www.ros.org/, is rapidly becoming a de facto standard for writing interoperable and reusable robot software. The interoperability and reusability of ROS software come at the price of an increased software complexity. Getting started with ROS is complex, especially for developers with no backgrounds in software engineering.

ROSbloX are building blocks that simplify the creation of a robot's software stack. They are designed based on the Robot Operating System (ROS) and comply with modern software engineering standards. With ROSbloX, users can easily develop, maintain, and scale their robot's software stack, even without prior software engineering experience. Each ROSbloX implements a sensor, actuator or algorithm, is equipped with multiple communication interfaces to connect to it and simple user interfaces, namely a web interface, a python library, and native ROS, to transmit data.

Available ROSbloX

The available ROSbloX are continuously expanded. Contact us to propose novel ROSbloX and to obtain existing ROSbloX!

Sensors

• BloX LIS3DH: Based on Adafruit's LIS3DH Triple-Axis Accelerometer
• BloX LSM6DSOX-LIS3MDL: Based on Adafruit's LSM6DSOX-LIS3MDL 9-DoF IMU
• BloX Zed Mini: Based on Stereolab's Zed Mini Mixed-Reality CameraBloX
• BloX Mosaic-X5: Based on Septentrio's open source GNSS mosaicHAT
• BloX Livox-Mid-70: Based on Livox's Mid-70 LiDAR
• BloX MOCAP4ROS2-Optitrack: Streams motion tracking data from Optitrack
• BloX Ina220: Read current and voltage from an INA220 sensor, which is commonly used in drones, via I2C
• BloX GSCam: Record and stream images from a USB webcam
• BloX AS5048B: Read position values from 14-bit absolute position encoder
• BloX Livox-Mid360: Record point clouds with a Livox's Mid-360 LiDAR
• BloX Robosense Bpearl: Record point clouds with a Robosense Bpearl LiDAR

Actuators

• BloX Joy-Linux: Use a gamepad connected via Bluetooth
• BloX Dynamixel: Based on Dynamixel SDK to control Dynamixel Servos
• BloX Lumecube: Allows controlling a Lumecube
• BloX micro-ROS: Interfaces with microcontrollers via micro-ROS
• BloX PCA9685: Interfaces with Adafruits PWM/Servo Driver via I2C

Algorithms

• BloX Bag Recorder: Record data to ROS bags

Planned

• BloX Plotjuggler: Debug your robot with browser-based Plotjuggler
• BloX RViz: Visualize your robot with browser-based RViz
• BloX RQt: Debug your robot with browser-based RQt
• BloX A-Loam: Lidar-SLAM based on A-LOAM
• BloX R3LIVE: Lidar-Visual-Inertial-SLAM based on R3LIVE
• BloX Isaac-ROS-Apriltag: Fast Apriltag detection using Nvidida's Isaac ROS
• BloX Isaac-ROS-(algorithms): GPU-accelerated algorithms from Nvidia Isaac ROS