The Sweetest Way to Build ROS2 Systems

Sugarcoat is a meta-framework that injects a whole lot of syntactic sugar into building complex, event-driven multinode systems in ROS2, all through an intuitive Python API.

Key Features

Packages Built with Sugarcoat

• Kompass: A framework for building robust and comprehensive event-driven navigation stacks using an easy-to-use and intuitive Python API.
• EmbodiedAgents: A fully-loaded framework for creating interactive physical agents that can understand, remember, and act upon contextual information from their environment.

Get Started

• Learn more about the design concepts in Sugarcoat 📚
• Learn how to create your own ROS2 package using Sugarcoat 🚀

(NEW!) Introducing Dynamic Web UI for Sugarcoat Recipes

The new Dynamic Web UI feature takes system visibility and control to the next level. Built with FastHTML and MonsterUI, it is designed to automatically generate a fully dynamic, extensible web interface for any Sugarcoat recipe, completely eliminating the need for manual front-end development.

This feature instantly transforms your complex, multinode ROS2 system into a monitorable and configurable web application.

Automatic UI Generation in Action

See how the Web UI effortlessly generates interfaces for different types of Sugarcoat recipes:

• Example 1: General Q\&A MLLM Recipe A fully functional interface generated for an MLLM agent recipe from EmbodiedAgents, automatically providing controls for settings and real-time text I/O with the robot.

• Example 2: Point Navigation Recipe An example for an automatically generated UI for a point navigation system from Kompass. The UI automatically renders map data, and sends navigation goals to the robot.

What’s Inside?

• Automatic Settings UI: Interfaces for configuring the settings of all Components used in your recipe are generated on the fly.
• Auto I/O Visualization: Front-end controls and data visualizations for UI Inputs and Outputs are created automatically.
• WebSocket-Based Streaming: Features bidirectional, low-latency communication for streaming text, image, and audio messages.
• Responsive Layouts: Input and output elements are presented in clear, adaptable grid layouts.
• Extensible Design: Easily add support for new message types and custom visualizations through extensions.

How Sugarcoat Works

The core of Sugarcoat revolves around a few concepts:

• Component: The main execution unit (a ROS2 lifecycle node abstraction) configured with Inputs/Outputs and Fallback behaviors. Each component reports its Health Status. Learn More about Components

• Events & Actions: Mechanisms to handle and reconfigure components dynamically at runtime. Learn More about Events

  Learn More about Actions

• Launcher: Takes your defined Components, Events, and Actions, and executes the system using multi-threaded or multi-process execution. It works with an internal Monitor to manage component lifecycles and track events. Learn More about the Launcher

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Changelog for package automatika_ros_sugar

0.4.1 (2025-11-07)

• (feature) Adds UI font files locally
• (fix) Fixes logging card scroll behavior
• (fix) Fixes drawing of output UI elements by filtering those that log
• (fix) Fixes setting id in divs added to logging card
• (fix) Clears last message when getting output for UI
• (feature) Adds method to augment exisiting text on logging card
• (fix) Fixes terminal scrolling behavior in UI
• (fix) Makes inputs/outputs displays conditional in UI
• (refactor) Moves logging card outputs to their own functions based on datatype
• Contributors: ahr, mkabtoul

0.4.0 (2025-11-04)

• (docs) Adds dynamic ui to docs and updates readme
• (feature) Adds automatika CSS custom style for UI
• (fix) Adds use of step in reading img msgs
• (fix) Fixes colors when converting image to jpeg using cv2
• (fix) Turns ComponentConfig run_type into a private parameter (_run_type) in the attrs class
• (feature) Makes streaming websocket connections more robust by recreating them after htmx events and adding reconnects for stale cache
• (fix) Handles nested settings classes in ui
• (feature) Adds UI_EXTENSIONS to add custom UI elements from derived packages
• (fix) Fixes parsing optional type for ui serialization
• (fix) Fixes getting relative path for static files
• (feature) Adds serialization of additional types
• (fix) Fixes base attrs handing of parsed types for ui serialization
• (fix) Handles literals inside generic types correctly
• (feature) Adds 'dragabble' sections
• (feature) Adds toggle button to all UI cards
• (feature) Presists updates settings on the UI
• (feature) Adds ui output for OccupancyGrid
• (fix) Fixes de-seralizing qos config in topics
• (feature) Adds ui dict converters for Point/Pose types
• (fix) Adjusts inputs/outputs grid display in UI frontend
• (feature) Adds extensibility to sending various datatypes to ROS topics
• (fix) Fixes type hint in launcher add_pkg for 3.8 compatibility
• (fix) Fixes input for 'less than' validator
• (feature) Adds responsive settings display styling
• (fix) Adds check for length of payload before putting it on the DOM
• (feature) Adds sending and logging audio msgs
• (feature) Adds audio elements to the log and adds clearing inputs after submission
• (feature) Adds header and audio message elements to frontend
• (feature) Adds dynamic creating of outputs starting with images
• (feature) Adds complete set of image and compressed image pre processing
• (feature) Adds raw data output option in extra callback functions
• (feature) Adds sending and receiving text, images and errors with websocket endpoint
• (fix) Fixes base attrs type description for Literal for python3.8+
• (fix) Moves get_field_info from BaseConfig to BaseAttrs
• (fix) Fixes transition for component config update service
• (feature) Adds publishers and subscribers to ui node for input and output topics
  • Adds method for publishing to inputs
• (feature) Adds routes for settings update and websocket connection
• (feature) Adds settings update through ui ros node
• (refactor) Breaks executable main into two functions
• (feature) Adds FastHTML based dynamically generated UI for recipe
  • Adds UI server executable that spins the UI ROS node in a thread
  • Adds dynamically generated settings UI
• (feature) Adds helper method to get fields, annotations and validators from BaseComponentConfig
• (fix) Adds minor fix to published frame id and occupancy grid sender
• Contributors: ahr, mkabtoul

0.3.2 (2025-09-03)

• (docs) Updates events docs with new classes
• (feature) Adds ros time automatically to stamped messages in publisher
• (fix) Fixes error in publishing audio msgs as byte arrays
• (fix) Fixes Pose publisher converter
• (fix) Fixes event handle once and delay options
• (fix) Fixes condition for OnChange event trigger
• (feature) Adds events for contains any/all plus change in value
• (fix) Fixes error in geomerty transformation util
• Contributors: ahr, mkabtoul

0.3.1 (2025-06-28)

• (refactor) Corrects type hint in callbacks
• (refactor) Adds type hints to validators
• (refactor) Minor improvements and typo correction
• (refactor) Resolves todo in component actions for active flag and adds default logger for module
• (chore) Updates service creation script with better error handling
• (docs) Updates installation instructions
• (refactor) Removes numpy-quaternion from dependencies and implements rotations using numpy

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