Boston Dynamics' Robot Dog Now Easier to Program
This could let more businesses use Spot robots without hiring expensive specialists.
The RAI Institute shared another open-source project: spot_basic. Working with Spot through ROS 2 can involve quite a bit of boilerplate, especially when interacting with the various topics, services, and actions exposed by the driver.
spot_basic aims to make this easier by providing a higher-level, intuitive Python API for interacting with Spot’s capabilities. Built on top of the spot_ros2 driver, spot_basic wraps the underlying ROS 2 interfaces into a consistent API that supports both synchronous and asynchronous programming.
Highlights include simplified robot commands for locomotion, manipulation, gripper control, and more; intuitive APIs for querying robot state, accessing transforms, and streaming camera data; synchronous and asynchronous execution; and runnable examples and guides for extending the API with new commands and actions. The article includes a snippet that gets Spot up and walking forward, and notes that spot_basic works great with spatial-math.
- spot_basic is a free, open-source tool that simplifies programming Boston Dynamics' Spot robot.
- It lets developers control Spot with simple Python commands, reducing the need for deep robotics expertise.
- This could lead to faster development of new applications for Spot in industries like manufacturing and emergency response.
Why It Matters
Makes advanced robots like Spot easier to program, potentially leading to new automated services and jobs.