Robotics Documentation

Ubuntu gives robotics teams a complete, production-grade platform to package, deploy, and maintain robot software at scale.

The Canonical Robotics stack is your end-to-end infrastructure, from first build to global fleet. Ubuntu Core and Snaps give you a reliable, production-grade foundation for packaging and deploying ROS applications. COS for Robotics is your observability suite for monitoring robots in the field. And with ROS ESM, you get guaranteed security maintenance for your ROS environment, long after upstream end-of-life.

Robotics developers shouldn’t have to become DevOps engineers. Our open source tools take this complexity off your plate, so you can focus on building great robots.

The Canonical Robotics stack is for robotics developers and integrators who need to ship robot applications reliably on solid open-source foundations.

In this documentation

• First Steps: Canonical Robotics Stack overview

• Packaging & distribution: Package a ROS application as a snap | ROS architectures with snaps | Deploy a robot with snaps and Ubuntu Core | Migrate from Docker to snap | Snapcraft plugins and extensions for ROS

• Observability & monitoring: Observability for robotics | Monitor your robot fleet | Alert rules configuration | Deploy COS with TLS encryption

• Security & long term support: Harden your robot | What is ESM for ROS | Security vulnerability audits | Check if a CVE is fixed

How this documentation is organized

• Tutorials offer a hands-on, step-by-step introduction to Canonical’s robotics solutions.

• How-to guides cover how to achieve specific goals with Canonical’s robotics stack.

• Explanation clarifies the core concepts and key topics that underpin Canonical’s robotics solutions.

• Reference provides technical details on specifications, architecture, API documentation, and troubleshooting tips.

Project and community

The Canonical Robotics stack is part of the Ubuntu ecosystem. Its products are open source projects that warmly welcome community contributions, suggestions, fixes and constructive feedback.

• Our Code of Conduct

• Community engagement commitment

• Join the Robotics conversation on Ubuntu Discourse

• Join the Snap(craft) forum

• Interactive chat on Matrix.org

Thinking about using the Canonical Robotics stack for your next project? Get in touch!