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I am in the process of learning ROS and Gazebo for a project and saw that Amazon's Robomaker seems to be a great environment to get something up and working quickly. My concern is if I design and develop my project in Robomaker, that it will be tough to move over to my own servers should the time come.

Has anyone had any experience with this? Is it pretty simple to move over to another solution/infrastructure or are you married to AWS once you go down the rabbit hole?

xtr33me
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Do they demand ownership of your IP? Basically, if it is "normal ROS", there's a robot encoded in an URDF file, there's a bunch of standard ROS libraries (gazebo, controller, robot_localization, amcl, etc.), all strung together by a bunch of launch files (aka xml startup scripts). They can't stop you from using this on your own system.

What they really offer, if you look at what they're pitching (https://aws.amazon.com/robomaker/), is a bunch of custom software, chiefly useful for running a fleet/multiple of robots in an industrial setting, involving human interaction / voice, data analytics and monitoring. For most people learning, if you were to even touch this (you can get entirely on your own on a native ubuntu or ubuntu virtualbox), their simulation environment may be nicer out-of-the-box (I haven't played with it). The rest of the benefits, to translate them, is to have robots with data analytics and fancy AI+web tools, and then to do fleet lifecycle management. You are most certainly not locked in - just make sure you want what they offer before shelling out anything.

JWCS
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  • Awesome answer JWCS! Thanks for the info. Im currently running Ubuntu 18.04 so I installed Morena locally and just got gazebo running. I was having some issues getting turtlebot working so far because it seems that it is supported more in earlier versions, but I'm reviewing my install a bit more now. That all said, I think I am just going to stay away from Robomaker for now. I'm also looking at TheConstruct for tuts. Going to first see if I can get work to pay for it though :) Thanks again for your help! – xtr33me Oct 27 '19 at 00:31
  • Cool! It's not that bad, learning, the Turtlebot (old and v3) repos are good, the UR (arm) robots have a clean repo, and the Clearpath robotics Husky/Jackel have some good robot repos as well, for learning what standard pkg naming/project organization looks like. After defining your own robot model in a robot_description pkg, and controllers, you can get pretty far without having to write any more real (non-xml launch file / other people's) code. – JWCS Oct 28 '19 at 05:46
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In general, is it also a good idea to put your application in containers using docker o AWS ECR. So you can deploy your app in any other environment using a CI/CD pipeline, including the edge computer.

Alex Salgado
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    As it’s currently written, your answer is unclear. Please [edit] to add additional details that will help others understand how this addresses the question asked. You can find more information on how to write good answers [in the help center](/help/how-to-answer). – Community Nov 25 '21 at 07:29