Introduction

Minot [mai·not] is a robot development toolset written in Rust and developed at the Computer Engineering Group at the Osnabrück University. It provides tools for developing and verifying robot software.

It implements a peer-to-peer network for pub/sub, services and actions over TCP with a novel approach to quality of service on node, publisher, service and action level for deterministic and highly reliable robotic software.

minot-coord # start manually
./my_publisher # written in Go
./my_subscriber # written in Rust

Minot is heavily built around ROS bags for reproducibility and features a realtime playback tool with the async command.

minot async <path_to_bag>

This is in contrast to the sync command, which interprets bagfiles as queryable timeseries data, giving you debugging superpowers and offline capabilities to every node with minimal changes to your existing C++/Rust code. To power all of these features, Minot uses its own simple language for type-safe configuration and querying.

minot sync <yourquery.mt>

Minot also runs as a ROS node. In that case, just prefix the usual ROS CLI:

ros2 run minot minot sync <yourquery.mt>

Refer to the installation for getting your Minot binaries.

All the provided features are meant to be used at development time to give you full control over the incoming data. It gives you transparency for complex systems where thousands of small sensor data packets are processed each second. With Minot, you regain control and explainability over what's happening when developing and integrating your robot.

Try it for yourself!

Selfcontained Independence

Minot is a collection of binaries and libraries. They can be used in your existing ROS1 or ROS2 nodes or completely separate from any existing framework. It ships its own as a library. This allows cross-ROS communication using its own networking layer without adding system dependencies. With Minot, you can also write, test and debug ROS perception nodes without needing ROS on your system. This is especially useful for testing, where determinism is essential. When you are done, just comment out a few lines or change a compile flag and you are ready to run your node in ROS.