Introduction: I recently learned that Clearpath of Canada is cooperating with Microsoft and intends to apply the ROS robot operating system to win10. At the beginning of this month, I saw the relevant trailer video released by Clearpath on the tubing, and I was very excited. This is a good news for Windows robot users, a leapfrog development of the ROS robot operating system. Not much to say, let's take a look at the performance of using ROS to operate the robot under the Windows platform.

Click to watch the video：ROS on Windows preview

Clearpath cooperates with Microsoft to introduce ROS to Windows to support Clearpath mobile robots

 Clearpath, a manufacturer of research and development mobile robot platforms, announced support for its unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) on Windows, which provides the ROS community with more choices and flexibility when developing robot systems using Clearpath.

The Robot Operating System (ROS) is an open source platform that provides robot developers with tools and libraries to help them build complex robots. It was only available on Linux-based systems until Microsoft announced ROS on Windows in May 2019. Since then, Clearpath and Microsoft's engineering team have worked together to bring ROS support on Windows 10 IoT Enterprise and Windows 10 Desktop to the Clearpath robot starting with Jackal UGV.

Julian Ware, general manager of Clearpath, said: "After introducing Windows and Azure into the ROS ecosystem, Microsoft has created a powerful and supported robot development tool. We have been a loyal supporter of ROS for more than ten years. I am very happy to work with Microsoft to bring this new feature to the ROS developer community."

Windows provides various benefits applicable to robotic solutions. First of all, Windows provides multiple layers of security improvements, which can protect deployments through its enterprise-level Windows security framework, detect anomalies and fix problems. Secondly, with the help of Windows 10 IoT Enterprise and Azure IoT, users can take full advantage of cloud computing by offloading processes to the cloud or using cloud intelligence for real-time decision-making and autonomy. Finally, developers can use the same familiar toolset and developer environment (such as Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code) and ROS extensions to accelerate application development on ROS.

"From the day when Microsoft announced the proof of concept at ROSCon 2018, Clearpath Robotics has been a supporter of ROS on Windows. With the number of key packages supported by ROS on Windows, Clearpath is able to provide solutions for customers who need Windows. Microsoft's Azure and Windows customers are increasingly looking to use automated mobile robots to increase efficiency, improve working conditions, maintain business continuity and increase social isolation. Through this partnership, customers can now integrate Clearpath's robot development platform with Windows 10 is used in conjunction with Azure IoT solutions." said Joe Coco, Microsoft Partner Program Manager.

Clearpath robots running Windows will provide the same user experience as Ubuntu-based robots. The robot is pre-installed and configured with ROS on Windows, so that users can start using it immediately. The video below will introduce us to the effects used on Windows.

Click to watch the video：Introduction to ROS on Windows

Windows 10 IoT Enterprise provides customers with the following main benefits, which also apply to robotics use cases:

Enterprise-level security: Microsoft is constantly developing the Windows security architecture, which covers devices, data, and user identities. With comprehensive tools to protect the data on the device, evaluate the health of the device, detect security issues, and remediate threats through device updates and management, Windows 10 IoT ensures that you have the latest security throughout the entire development, deployment, and operation process.

Easy cloud connection: Windows 10 IoT Enterprise provides you with an easy entry to Azure IoT, allowing you to use the Azure IoT Center ROS node to use related cloud services to analyze data, get suggestions, and take actions on the page.

More intelligence: The Windows ML ROS node allows you to deploy a pre-trained ONNX machine learning model on the robot for low-latency image processing at the edge. The WinML ROS node uses compatible hardware (CPU, GPU or neural accelerator) to accelerate the ONNX model to publish the markers to the ROS graph, which can be used for obstacle avoidance or environmental awareness.

Faster development: Development on Windows 10 provides the same familiar development environment, tools and framework, allowing you to create and deploy solutions faster. If you use ROS's VS Code Extension to code ROS applications, you can quickly start the ROS environment, which provides you with integrated build tasks and roslaunch-based debugging functions. It also presents the Unified Robot Description File (URDF), which saves developers time when editing URDF files. Once you are ready to go into production, you can easily enable continuous integration, continuous simulation and continuous deployment using Azure DevOps. Add simulation-based testing to the CI/CD pipeline to ensure that in addition to unit testing, integration testing, and regression testing, you can also verify the expected functionality of the robot in the deployment environment. As part of the ROS2 Technical Steering Committee, Microsoft contributed to the tool working group, so that GitHub Actions can also be used to enable CI/CD.

Currently, ROS on Windows is available on Jackal UGV and supports other Clearpath robots. Log in to https://microsoft.github.io/Win-RoS-Landing-Page/clearpath_case_study.html# to learn more about ROS on Windows. For more information about Jackal UGV, please refer to the picture below. Need more Please leave a message for information. More about the progress of this project we will continue to update here, so stay tuned. 

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