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What's New

This page tracks changes to the Azure Edge Robotics Documentation.

April 2021

ROS2 Foxy on Hololens

We've been working on migrating a prototype of ROS2 on Hololens code to Foxy. This is split into two repositories, ROS2 Native and ROS2 Mixed Reality Toolkit for Unity. When this work is completed, it will be made available as a nuget package on the Microsoft Chocolatey & Nuget server for ROS, with instructions for installation located on the Azure Edge Robotics landing Page.

Noetic Installation dependencies

During late April, vcredist2010 was broken on Chocolatey.org, due to a security fix changing the hash of the installer. Because the Microsoft ROS installers depended on this for installation, the chocolatey packages were blocked. We are spinning a new build without this dependency.

Azure Kinect

We have a large number of Pull Requests in the Azure Kinect which we will address in May.

Visual Studio Code updates

We root caused a a memory leak in vscode and have addressed this with the Visual Studio code team. The next release will fix the core issue in VSCode. Until this is released, if you use VSCode in a container on Ubuntu, please do not enable Port forwarding - instead run ROSCore in the container.

rosdep for ROS2

The Microsoft ROS2 releases do not automatically include rosdep. We investigated how do appropriately add this to the release. We will include in future releases - starting with a rev of Foxy, and in Galactic.

March 2021

ROS Camera node for Windows

We resolved an issue with stride, which impacted some modes of the Azure Kinect.

ROS2 Rolling and Galactic

Introduced rolling builds and set up for Galactic release of ROS2. Updated maintainers handbook.

January 2021

ROS 2 Launch debugging in VSCode!

Yes, you can now press F5 to launch a ROS2 node from VSCode and step through it.

Updated Dependencies

OPML with ROS Industrial

ROS Node bringup for UFactory XArm on ROS on Windows

Brought up in collaboration with UFActory. https://github.com/ms-iot/xarm_ros

December 2020

Refresh ROS1 Melodic, ROS1 Noetic, ROS2 Foxy

Updated across the board.

November 2020

Onnx Runtime ROS Node

Cross Platform, hardware accelerated ML ROS node

October 2020

ROS nodes in an Azure IoT Edge Container

Demonstrated running ROS nodes in an Azure IoT Edge container

Azure Kinect ROS Node for ROS2

Azure Kinect now supports ROS2.

September 2020

Theme Update!

Update documentation themes.

More MoveIt on Foxy for Windows

Documentation and build updates for Moveit On Windows

August 2020

ROS2 Versions of Microsoft Nodes

Windows ML ROS2 port Windows Camera node for ROS2

VM documenation

Updated Virtual Machine Documentation

MoveIt 2 on Foxy on Windows

https://moveit.ros.org/moveit2/ros2/foxy/release/2020/09/04/moveit2-foxy-release.html

Continuous Simulation with Scale Set support

Added documentation for using Azure Scale Sets to spin up many simulation instances.

July 2020

ROS Distro

Move the Chocolatey distribution to a public redirect Use Azure DevOps centralized Nuget server.

ROS2 for Hololens

Bootstrap ROS2 for Hololens

ROS2.net Fixes

Add ROS2 Eloquent support

Add Windows Media Foundation ROS Node

Enables High performance Camera support Adds support for realtime video streaming for teleoperation https://github.com/ms-iot/ros_msft_camera

June 2020

Simulation

Simulation using Azure DevOps for ROS on Linux Simulation with Github Agents on Windows Simulation with Github Agents on Linux Fixes for Typos

ROS2

ROS2 binary install documentation update on both http://aka.ms/ros and Open Robotics documentation.

Azure IoT ROS Node

x.509 Certificate and Device Provisioning Service Support

Azure Kinect ROS Node

Performance improvements Multicamera crash fixes

Commercial Deployment of ROS using MSIx

MSIx is a MDM and intune deployable binary installation. Added documentation for building a MSIx package for ROS infrastructure and customer install.

ROS1 Fixes on Windows

Improved timer repeatability on Windows.

May 2020

Simulation with Github

Coming soon

Continuous Deployment on Azure DevOps

ROS::Time fixes

We discovered a bug in low level time routines, which affects localization. Corrected and in testing.

Gmapping

By popular request, we're working on gmapping

April 2020

Continuous Deployment on Github

Added documentation for building Windows packages and publishing a chocolatey package as a github release.

Continuous Simulation Lab

Added a project which describes simulation during build, and tests which validate the build in simulation.

March 2020

ROS Github Action

From within Github, you can set up Continuous integration using a Github Action, brought to you by the Tooling Working Group of the ROS2 Technical Steering Committee, with contributions from Microsoft.

MoveIt Updates

MoveIt Tutorials have been updated to work on Windows.

February 2020

Cross platform ROS node updates

We have been adding notes to the porting cookbook based on customer feedback.

Performance

We've added a section on optimizing performance of Windows for Robotics scenarios. Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC (Long Term Support Channel) is our recommended operating system for Robotics, as it offers the smallest footprint, and includes 10 years of support.

January 2020

State of ROS on Windows

ROS1 for Windows was announced generally available in May 2019. Since then it's use has continued to grow. Many companies are porting nodes to Windows. The Visual Studio Code extension has been incredibly well adopted within the community.

New Look for Documents

Documentation and Developer experience are a top priority. We're starting off by refreshing the look of docs; following up with turtorials on how to bring solutions up on Windows.