automatika_ros_sugar

Syntactic sugar for ROS2 nodes creation and management

Links

README

Part of the EMOS ecosystem

The orchestration layer for event-driven ROS 2 systems

EMOS Documentation | Developer Docs | Discord

What is Sugarcoat?

Sugarcoat is the orchestration layer of the EMOS (Embodied Operating System) ecosystem by Automatika Robotics. It is a meta-framework that replaces fragmented ROS2 development with a unified workflow, providing a high-level Python API to build robust lifecycle-managed components and orchestrate them into cohesive, self-healing systems using an event-driven architecture.

For full documentation, tutorials, and recipes, visit emos.automatikarobotics.com.

Key Features & Core Pillars

Feature	Description
Smart Components	Every component is a managed lifecycle node (Configure, Activate, Deactivate) out of the box. It features type-safe configurations via `attrs` and declarative auto-wiring for inputs/outputs.
Active Resilience	Built-in “Immune System” for ROS2 nodes. Components actively report their Health Status (Algorithm, Component, or System failures) and automatically trigger distributed Fallbacks to self-heal without crashing.
Event-Driven Behavior	Define global Events (e.g., `Event(battery < 10.0)`) and Actions in pure, readable Python. These act as triggers that monitor ROS2 topics natively and execute instantly regardless of current system state.
Centralized Orchestration	A powerful Launcher acts as a pythonic alternative to `ros2 launch`. It supports multi-threaded or multi-process execution, actively supervising component lifecycles at runtime.
Universal Applications	Robot Plugins act as a translation layer. This allows you to write generic, portable automation logic (recipes) that run on any robot without code changes.
Dynamic Web UI	Auto-generates a fully functional web frontend for every topic, parameter, and event instantly.

Dynamic Web UI for Sugarcoat Recipes

The Dynamic Web UI feature takes system visibility and control to the next level. Built with FastHTML and MonsterUI, it is designed to automatically generate a fully dynamic, extensible web interface for any Sugarcoat recipe, completely eliminating the need for manual front-end development.

Automatic UI Generation in Action

See how the Web UI effortlessly generates interfaces for different types of Sugarcoat recipes:

Example 1: General Q&A MLLM Recipe A fully functional interface generated for an MLLM agent recipe from EmbodiedAgents, automatically providing controls for settings and real-time text I/O with the robot.

EmbodiedAgents UI Example GIF

Example 2: Point Navigation Recipe An example for an automatically generated UI for a point navigation system from Kompass. The UI automatically renders map data, and sends navigation goals to the robot.

Navigation System UI Example GIF

What’s Inside?

Automatic Settings UI: Interfaces for configuring the settings of all Components used in your recipe are generated on the fly.
Auto I/O Visualization: Front-end controls and data visualizations for UI Inputs and Outputs are created automatically.
WebSocket-Based Streaming: Features bidirectional, low-latency communication for streaming text, image, and audio messages.
Responsive Layouts: Input and output elements are presented in clear, adaptable grid layouts.
Extensible Design: Easily add support for new message types and custom visualizations through extensions.

Documentation

Resource	URL
Usage Docs (EMOS)	emos.automatikarobotics.com
Developer Docs	sugarcoat.automatikarobotics.com
API Reference	sugarcoat.automatikarobotics.com/apidocs

Installation

Sugarcoat is available for ROS versions Humble.

Using your Package Manager (Recommended)

On Ubuntu, for example:

sudo apt install ros-$ROS_DISTRO-automatika-ros-sugar

Building from Source

mkdir -p ros-sugar-ws/src
cd ros-sugar-ws/src
git clone https://github.com/automatika-robotics/sugarcoat && cd ..

# Install dependencies (ensure attrs>=23.2.0 is included)
pip install numpy opencv-python-headless 'attrs>=23.2.0' jinja2 msgpack msgpack-numpy setproctitle pyyaml toml

colcon build
source install/setup.bash

Development

Running Tests

# Full test suite
colcon test --packages-select automatika_ros_sugar
colcon test-result --verbose

# Individual tests with pytest
python -m pytest tests/ -v

Developer Docs

For contributors and developers extending Sugarcoat:

Architecture Overview – Core module structure, component lifecycle, IO system, and process graph.
Extending the Type System – How to add custom SupportedType subclasses and register them.
Event & Action System Internals – Condition trees, action dispatch, and the fallback system.
Testing Guide – Unit testing, integration testing with launch_testing, and running the test suite.

Contributing

Sugarcoat has been developed in collaboration between Automatika Robotics and Inria. Contributions from the community are most welcome.

Please open an issue or pull request on GitHub.

Hat Tip

The Dynamic Web UI is powered by two awesome open-source projects. A big thank you to Answers.ai for their work on:

FastHTML: The HTMX based framework that enables automatic generation of our dynamic web interfaces.
MonsterUI: The styled UI components that make the interface intuitive.

License

Sugarcoat is a collaboration between Automatika Robotics and Inria.