Robotics for everyone¶

Ask someone new to robotics to get a ROS project running and watch what happens. They are not on the right OS so the first have to learn OS upgrading/installation or learn VM/Docker, they have to learn a lot about apt bash and other Linux specific knowledge. While that's all good it's limiting the number of people who can get started with ROS. Other frameworks like lerobot or dora are focusing much more on cross-platform support, and are easier to get started with. ROS doesn't have to be that way, and with RoboStack and Pixi it isn't.

Right now there is basically one answer to this: stop fighting your own machine and move development into a VM or a Docker image. It makes the setup doable, and everyone on the team can share the same image. But you're not getting a "normal" development experience where you can just run things locally on your machine. Your whole workflow now lives inside a box, and you lose the flexibility of your own machine.

Using ROS forces you into a specific OS, a specific version, and a specific workflow. This might be a good start for most robotics projects but for sure not all. ROS is missing out on a lot of users due to this lock-in.

The philosophy of Pixi and RoboStack¶

Pixi together with RoboStack take a different approach.

• Binaries for all machines, not just Ubuntu.
• Reproducible, share it with your team without requiring a Docker Image.
• Declarative, use version control to roll back to a known good state.
• Fast, to get started in minutes instead of hours.
• Flexible, use the latest greatest, or pin to a known good version.

Giving control back to the developer, instead of depending on the ecosystem dictating how you should work.

 git clone <your-project>
 cd <your-project>
 pixi run application
 # Installs your full ROS environment
 # Runs the right launchfile for your project

Cross-platform¶

RoboStack is focused on making ROS work on Linux, macOS, and Windows. There is a huge list of packages available on all major platforms. Making it possible for anyone to join without first having to understand Ubuntu, Docker, or WSL2.

This is extended with Pixi, which has the ability to manage multiple platforms from a single project file. Making it possible to use the same project file, and CLI commands to run your ROS application on any machine.

Distroless¶

We don't believe in distro lock-in. To us it's just a release process but there is no reason ROS2 Humble should be tied to Ubuntu 22.04, or ROS2 Lyrical to Ubuntu 26.04. RoboStack packages ROS2 for all distro's but that means that you can run any distro on any machine.

Project focused¶

Pixi allows you to declare your entire ROS environment in a single pixi.toml file, including system libraries, Python packages, and ROS nodes. The lockfile guarantees that anyone who checks out your project can recreate the same environment, on any machine, without having to know the details of how to set it up. This creates a fully reproducible environment for your project, and makes it easy to share with others.

Flexible dependency management¶

RoboStack is build on top of conda-forge, which is a huge collection of pre-built, cross-platform binary packages. This means that you can use any package from conda-forge in your ROS project, and you can also use any package from RoboStack in your conda-forge project. This allows you to mix and match dependencies from both ecosystems, and gives you the flexibility to use the best tool for the job, without being locked into a specific distribution or package manager.

Standing on conda-forge and RoboStack¶

None of this would work without an enormous amount of community effort underneath it. conda-forge is a huge, community-run collection of pre-built, cross-platform binary packages, tens of thousands of them, already compiled for Linux, macOS, and Windows. That is the base layer. It provides packages and libraries like gcc, Python, cmake, OpenCV, PyTorch, and many more, all built for multiple platforms and architectures.

RoboStack builds on conda-forge and packages the ROS distributions themselves as conda packages, so you can install ROS the same way you install anything else, on any of those platforms. It provides packages from most ROS distributions, from Noetic to Lyrical, like ros-noetic-rqt to ros-lyrical-plotjuggler, and everything in between. It is maintained by people like Tobias Fischer, Silvio Traversaro, and Daisuke Nishimatsu, and it is genuinely hard work to keep ROS compiling across multiple operating systems. The two channels compose into a single environment: conda-forge for most dependencies, RoboStack for the ROS parts.

Next up: Pixi in 30 minutes.