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Show HN: Basis – a production focused robotics framework

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Re: Show HN: Basis – a production focused robotics framework

#21

Post by a_t48 »

Waterluvian wrote: post #20
a_t48 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compression, encryption, auth: not immediately. What's the use case here? Multi-machine robots are _tricky_ to get right. Running remote controls and telemetry via the framework would be really cool, but is also tricky to tune (need really good qos controls), and needs some work to be exposed safely to the outside world. Proper schemas/API versioning: I'm not sure what you mean by "proper schemas", but schema/API ver…

Use case: Imagine a location with hundreds of autonomous mobile robots that want to share state and plans with each other to behave more optimally than if they only saw each other through their sensors. They also want to share state and telemetry with monitoring systems so that humans can maintain a fleet's healthiness and address issues proactively. After years of working with tens of thousands of deployed robots, o…

Swarm robots: yeah, this is a really cool, but somewhat specialized for now use case. Would love to support it.

Message definitions: ros1msg does make this a little painful. Protobuf at least lets you have differing schema versions, and will do best effort to try and do forwards compatibility. The downside - this has bit me a few times in development where I've forgotten to restart a process - it will happily deserialize with the new fields being empty.

Re: Show HN: Basis – a production focused robotics framework

#23

Post by a_t48 »

pj_mukh wrote: post #22

Looks super cool. Would be nice to have a "try it out" section. I wanna plug it into a simulator and write a node (is that what you call it?), to make it do something. That would make things super clear.

We do have https://docs.basisrobotics.tech/guide-getting-started/enviro... and https://github.com/basis-robotics/basis-examples/tree/main/c... but I want to improve our first time user experience. (we call them units)

Re: Show HN: Basis – a production focused robotics framework

#24

Post by huem0n »

I'm always looking for a ROS replacement.

The limitations section at the bottom of the readme is excellent. Good level of detail and self-awareness. More projects need that.

Sadly, while theres a lot of stuff I like, ultimately I don't think this is the ROS replacement the world needs. Specifically because of step 1: clone the repo (or add as submodule).

Its a terrible move, IMO, to not have the pub/sub system be a binary executable or shared object file. ROS's fatal flaw (among many flaws IMO) is requiring every library-user to be able to build from source. I'm glad it doesnt dictate a folder structure, but I'm really sad to see this project continue the trend of needing to build from source.

Re: Show HN: Basis – a production focused robotics framework

#25

Post by pj_mukh »

a_t48 wrote: post #23
pj_mukh wrote: post #22

Looks super cool. Would be nice to have a "try it out" section. I wanna plug it into a simulator and write a node (is that what you call it?), to make it do something. That would make things super clear.

We do have https://docs.basisrobotics.tech/guide-getting-started/enviro... and https://github.com/basis-robotics/basis-examples/tree/main/c... but I want to improve our first time user experience. (we call them units)

Oh very cool.

Would it be crazy to try and connect it to Gazebo?

Re: Show HN: Basis – a production focused robotics framework

#26

Post by huem0n »

a_t48 wrote: post #14
Falimonda wrote: post #2

Have you presented this on any ROS forums? If so, how was it received?

I have not, it honestly feels a little rude to do so - but maybe I should.

Sounds like a speedrun for angry feedback. Maybe find threads discussing problems with ROS, then post in those threads

Re: Show HN: Basis – a production focused robotics framework

#28

Post by huem0n »

huem0n wrote: post #24

I'm always looking for a ROS replacement. The limitations section at the bottom of the readme is excellent. Good level of detail and self-awareness. More projects need that. Sadly, while theres a lot of stuff I like, ultimately I don't think this is the ROS replacement the world needs. Specifically because of step 1: clone the repo (or add as submodule). Its a terrible move, IMO, to not have the pub/sub system be a b…

To not be all negative though; I love the work on making it deterministic, and having first class docker support. ROS is such a crap-shoot when it comes to reproducibility. I mean bag files are great and all, but when its demo time on stage something always behaves inconsistently.

I'm actually not a fan of the "bring your own serializer" design. I think just use one serializer thats fast (like protobuf) and then let other serializers be built on top of that (e.g. JSON). I could be wrong, but thats my hunch of a good system.

Re: Show HN: Basis – a production focused robotics framework

#29

Post by a_t48 »

huem0n wrote: post #24

I'm always looking for a ROS replacement. The limitations section at the bottom of the readme is excellent. Good level of detail and self-awareness. More projects need that. Sadly, while theres a lot of stuff I like, ultimately I don't think this is the ROS replacement the world needs. Specifically because of step 1: clone the repo (or add as submodule). Its a terrible move, IMO, to not have the pub/sub system be a b…

We will eventually have a binary distribution. I chose not to for this release because it's not the workflow I want to encourage, and due to the management overhead of having to create packages for every combination of hardware/OS we'd like to support with a team of two (also, I need to learn the proper way to install headers with CMake...). I don't want to lock users to my OS of choice, I want to ensure it's easy to do things like turn on "-march=native" for the whole codebase, and I want it to be easy to fork and patch/customize.

I don't get your comment about ROS - in my experience with ROS, most users don't build the distribution from source, they use apt or similar, up until they need to fork it to fix some bug or another (and then cry because you have to muck with apt's repository version syntax to use _your_ version of the package and not upstream). Regardless, I think it is important that users are able to build from source if needed - see above. Why would you like to restrict that?

Re: Show HN: Basis – a production focused robotics framework

#30

Post by a_t48 »

huem0n wrote: post #28
huem0n wrote: post #24

I'm always looking for a ROS replacement. The limitations section at the bottom of the readme is excellent. Good level of detail and self-awareness. More projects need that. Sadly, while theres a lot of stuff I like, ultimately I don't think this is the ROS replacement the world needs. Specifically because of step 1: clone the repo (or add as submodule). Its a terrible move, IMO, to not have the pub/sub system be a b…

To not be all negative though; I love the work on making it deterministic, and having first class docker support. ROS is such a crap-shoot when it comes to reproducibility. I mean bag files are great and all, but when its demo time on stage something always behaves inconsistently. I'm actually not a fan of the "bring your own serializer" design. I think just use one serializer thats fast (like protobuf) and then let…

I'd like to very much encourage protobuf as the serializer, but supporting others both gives users the freedom to pick their own tradeoffs, and makes it 10x easier to transition from ROS or another framework. We do support JSON output from the serializer layer - I'd rather not do other conversions if possible.
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