Story

Hi HN, we build an open-source operating system extension for orchestrating robot swarms fully decentralized.

This first beta version allows you to create fully decentralized robot swarms. The system will set up a wireless mesh network and run a p2p networking stack on top of it, such that nodes can interact with each other through various abstractions using our SDKs (Rust, Python, TypeScript) or a CLI.

We hope this is a step toward better inter-robot communication (and a fun project if you have a few Raspberry Pis lying around).

Our mesh network is created by B.A.T.M.A.N.-adv and we’ve combined this with optimized decentralized algorithms. To a user, it becomes very easy to write decentralized applications involving several peers since we’ve abstracted away much of the complexity. Our system currently offers several orchestration primitives (Key-Value Store, Pub-Sub, Discovery, Request-Response, Mesh Inspection, Debug Services, etc.)

Internally, everything except the SDKs is written in Rust, building on top of libp2p. We use gRPC to communicate between the SDKs and the CLI, so libraries for other languages are possible, and we welcome contributions (or feedback).

The C++ SDK and a ROS package that should feel natural to roboticists are in the works. Soon we also want to support a collaborative SLAM and a distributed task queue.

We’d love to hear your thoughts! :)