Sugarcoat 🍬 is a meta-framework that provides a whole lot of syntactic sugar for creating event-driven multinode systems in ROS2, using an intuitive Python API.

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

Packages created using 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.

Overview

Sugarcoat is built for ROS2 developers who want to create event-driven systems with multiple nodes that are easy to use, have builtin fallbacks and fault tolerance, and can be configured started with an intuitive Python API. It provides primitives for writing ROS nodes, and events/actions which can start/stop/modify the nodes, in the spirit of event driven software. Sugarcoat is also a replacement for the ROS Launch API.

A Component is the main execution unit in Sugarcoat, each component is configured with Inputs/Outputs and Fallback behaviors. Additionally, each component updates its own Health Status. Components can be handled and reconfigured dynamically at runtime using Events and Actions. Events, Actions and Components are passed to the Launcher which runs the set of components as using multi-threaded or multi-process execution. The Launcher also uses an internal Monitor to keep track of the components and monitor events.

Base Component

Multi-Process Execution

Installation

For ROS versions >= humble, you can install Sugarcoat with your package manager. For example on Ubuntu:

sudo apt install ros-$ROS_DISTRO-automatika-ros-sugar

Alternatively, grab your favorite deb package from the release page and install it as follows:

sudo dpkg -i ros-$ROS_DISTRO-automatica-ros-sugar_$version$DISTRO_$ARCHITECTURE.deb

If the attrs version from your package manager is < 23.2, install it using pip as follows:

pip install 'attrs>=23.2.0'

Building from source

mkdir -p ros-sugar-ws/src
cd ros-sugar-ws/src
git clone https://github.com/automatika-robotics/sugarcoat && cd ..
pip install numpy opencv-python-headless 'attrs>=23.2.0' jinja2 msgpack msgpack-numpy setproctitle pyyaml toml
colcon build
source install/setup.bash

Copyright

The code in this distribution is Copyright (c) 2024 Automatika Robotics unless explicitly indicated otherwise.

Sugarcoat is made available under the MIT license. Details can be found in the LICENSE file.

Contributions

Sugarcoat has been developed in collaboration between Automatika Robotics and Inria. Contributions from the community are most welcome.

Changelog for package automatika_ros_sugar

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
• (docs) Updates logo icon and adds 'config from file' page to docs
• (fix) Adds wait for node activation after restart and fixes optional arguments parsing in Component
• (docs) Updates events docs
• (docs) Adds international readmes
• (chore) Removes pip based test dependencies for ROS build farm
• (docs) Updates readme
• Contributors: ahr, mkabtoul

0.3.0 (2025-06-18)

• (chore) Updates installation instructions and CI
• (fix) Removes NoneType from types for compatibility with python < 3.10
• (fix) Add missing pyyaml dependency
• (feature) Adds config parsing from toml, json and yaml and removes Omegaconf dependency
• (fix) Add missing action decorator to methods
• (docs) Updates img names
• (docs) Updates readme
• (chore) Adds a sweeter name for ROS Sugar .. Sugarcoat
• (docs) Minor edits
• (docs) Adds documentation for creating systemd services with scripts
• (docs) Fixes size of logo
• (docs) Fixes warnings in docs
• (docs) Minor fix
• (docs) Updates supported types docs
• (fix) Fixes minor typo
• (fix) Fixes logging level parsing
• (feature) Adds node logging level and rclpy logging level to component config
• (fix) Adds BGR2RGB tranformation for yuv422_yuy2 encoding
• (docs) Removes unused extension
• (docs) Adds docs for components services and pkg advantages
• Merge branch 'feature/system_management' of github.com:automatika-robotics/ros-sugar into feature/system_management
• (fix) Fixes transformation quaternion parsing
• (feature) Adds utility method for processing all ROS image encodings
• (feature) Adds transformation/rotation propertires to TFListener
• (fix) Fixes lifecycle transitioin callback in component
• (chore) Adds msgpack-numpy and attrs as deb package dependencies
• (fix) Handles lifecycle actions start/stop/restart from the launcher
• (fix) Adds action goal lock to handle aborting ongoing goals and executing new incoming goals
• Contributors: ahr, mkabtoul

0.2.9 (2025-02-18)

• (docs) Updates supported types docs and adds docstrings
• (feature) Adds a script to make any python script a systemd service
• (fix) Minor fix to check for action server creation before destruction
• (fix) Adds algorithm config from yaml if available
• (fix) Removes setproctitle as a hard dependency
• (fix) Checks for subscription in got_inputs method
• (fix) Fixes type hints for python3.8 compatibility
• Contributors: ahr, mkabtoul

0.2.8 (2025-01-28)

• (fix) Removes testing to keep build stable until dependencies are merged in rosdistro
• Contributors: ahr

0.2.7 (2025-01-28)

• (fix) Fixes ChildComponent class in tests
• (fix) Minor fix in component execution_step
• (feature) Adds pytests to package.xml and CMakeLists
• (feature) Adds tests for Actios and ComponentRunType
• (fix) Fixes health_status publishing for non timed components
• (feature) Adds pytest for all event classes and fixes existing errors
• (feature) Adds support for std_msgs MultiArray messages
• (fix) Fixes Event trigger value check and OnGreater event serialization
• Contributors: Maria Kabtoul, mkabtoul

0.2.6 (2025-01-17)

• (fix) Fixes type hint
• (fix) Fixes getting available events
• (feature) checks for components and events duplicate names
• (fix) Changes type of monitor components to activate
• (chore) Fixes OS versions in CI
• (chore) Adds arms builds to debian packaging

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