Modules and Services

The
ROS2 container
includes the ROS 2 middleware and tools, Intel® RealSense™ SDK and ROS 2 wrapper, GStreamer* and build tools, ROS 2 packages (Cartographer, Navigation, RTAB_MAP) and the Fast Mapping application (the Intel-optimized version of octomap).
The
OpenVINO container
includes the
ROS2 container
, as well as the OpenVINO™ development toolkit, the OpenVINO™ DL GStreamer* plugins and the Wandering demonstration application.
The AMR Full Flavour container includes the OpenVINO™ container, as well as the Intel® oneAPI Base Toolkit, the Data Parallel C++ (DPC++) compatibility tool and profiler, analyzer tools.

Drivers

Middleware

Robot Operating System (ROS) software stack V2 (ROS 2) from the open source project (ros.org), able to execute sample ROS 2 tutorial applications
The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a set of open source software libraries and tools for building robot applications.
ROS 2 depends on other middleware, like the Object Management Group (OMG) DDS connectivity framework that uses a publish–subscribe pattern.
Intel® Distribution of OpenVINO™ toolkit 2021.2, supporting heterogeneous execution across an Intel CPU, integrated graphics, Intel® Neural Compute Stick 2 (Intel® NCS2), and Intel® Vision Accelerator Design with Intel® Movidius™ Myriad™ VPUs
Intel® oneAPI Base Toolkit, able to execute Intel® oneAPI Base Toolkit sample applications. The Intel® oneAPI Base Toolkit is a core set of tools and libraries for developing high-performance, data-centric applications across diverse architectures. It features an industry-leading C++ compiler and the Data Parallel C++ (DPC++) language, an evolution of C++ for heterogeneous computing.
For Intel® oneAPI Base Toolkit training and a presentation of the CUDA converter, refer to:
Intel® DPC++ Compatibility Tool Self-Guided Jupyter Notebook Tutorial
Optimize Edge Compute Performance by Migrating CUDA to DPC++
RealSense SDK and RealSense ROS 2 Wrapper, able to execute Intel® RealSense™ ROS 2 Wrapper sample applications
GStreamer* including support for libv4l2 video sources and GStreamer* plugins

Algorithms

ROS2 Cartographer 2D LIDAR SLAM: A cartographer is a system that provides real-time SLAM, here based on real-time 2D LIDAR sensor data. It is used to generate as-built floor plans or maps.
ROS 2 Intel® RealSense™ vSLAM: Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (vSLAM) can map the location and create a 3D virtual map, based on computer vision.
ROS 2 Intel® RealSense™ FastMapping Algorithm: An algorithm on top of ROS that generates and maintains a volumetric representation of the environment given the depth image input of Intel® RealSense™ camera (e.g. D435i) and the position from a localization algorithm, such as General SLAM (GSLAM), RTAB_MAP, vSLAM, etc.
ROS2 Navigation: The ROS 2 Nav2 Navigation Stack seeks to find a safe way to have a mobile robot move from point A to point B. This will complete dynamic path planning, compute velocities for motors, detect and avoid obstacles, and structure recovery behaviors.
OpenVINO™ Model Zoo: Optimized deep learning models and a set of demos expedite development of high-performance deep learning inference applications. You can use these pre-trained models instead of training your own models to speed up the development and production deployment process.

Applications

Wandering AI Application: The Intel® RealSense™ AI Wandering ROS 2 sample application demonstrates the combination of the middleware, algorithms, and the ROS 2 navigation stack to move a robot around a room avoiding hitting obstacles, updating a local map in real time exposed as ROS topic, and publish AI-based objects detected in another ROS topic. It uses the robot’s sensors and actuators that are available from the robot’s hardware configuration.

Tools

From the hardware perspective of the supported platforms, there are no known limitations for ROS 1 components.
For information on porting ROS 1 applications to ROS 2, here is a guide from the ROS community.

rviz2, to visualize ROS topics
rqt, a software framework of ROS that implements the various Graphical User Interface (GUI) tools in the form of plugins
colcon, a collective construction command line tool to improve the workflow of building, testing, and using multiple software packages. It automates the process, handles the ordering, and sets up the environment to use the packages.

The Gazebo* robot simulator, making it possible to rapidly test algorithms, design robots, perform regression testing, and train AI systems using realistic scenarios. Gazebo offers the ability to simulate populations of robots accurately and efficiently in complex indoor and outdoor environments.
An industrial simulation room model for Gazebo*, the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) Gazebo Environment for Agile Robotics (GEAR) workcell that was used for the ARIAC competition in 2018

Terminology