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.