What is MicroRos and A Pi Pico - VTAstrobotics/Documentation GitHub Wiki


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Contents

Prerequisites

To understand the content on this page, you should know how to

  • Read
  • basic understanding of ROS2. What is at a high level a topic/message/node?

Content

For this Page we are mostly concerned with the MicroROS Agent node and the MicroROS Node. Pico drawio(1)

MicroROS

For our purposes we can consider the MicroROS agent a black box that turns everything sent on a given serial port into ROS2 topics and messages.

Pico

The Pico is the microcontroller that we are using to replace our Arduinos. It is significantly more technically capable compared to the Arduinos. Because of this boost in technical performance we can now use MicroROS.

MicroROSpt2

MicroROS is a software framework that with some configuration allows for microcontrollers to run full ROS programs and be written in the same way you would write any other ROS code for a project. Since MicroROS isn't written strictly for the Pico we have to provide some interfaces such as how to transmit serial data and how to read the time. Other than that the package just works.

Further reading

Pico C++ sdk Microros publisher subscriber example