Show HN: Transitive, an open-source framework for full-stack robotic software
transitiverobotics.com
The Transitive framework makes it easy to build robot cloud portals. Even given all the great open-source tools for web development and device management, building such cloud portals for robots is still not an easy task. There are several reasons for this, but a big one is that robots are different from regular servers, despite many people attempting to tread them as such. They go offline a lot, have limited network bandwidth, and each robot in a fleet may run a different version of software and require a different configuration. Robots also generate a lot of data, some of which needs to be synced in real-time with cloud and web front-ends for processing and visualization, some of which recorded, and some discarded. In addition robots roam insecure areas and are connected over networks outside of the control of the startup, hence requiring tight authentication and authorization.
Transitive solves many of these issues. It provides a reliable, real-time data synchronization protocol that operates on top of MQTT, called MQTTSync. MQTTSync seamlessly synchronizes stateful data between robot, cloud, and web, instead of just passing messages. It provides the notion of full-stack packages that implement encapsulation and versioning of software components for all three systems (robot, cloud, and web) and uses MQTTSync's name-spaced data model to reliably communicate and operate, even when different robots run different versions of the package. The robot and cloud components are run in sandboxes to isolate them from the rest of the system, and the web components can be embedded in any web page including existing robot cloud portals. And of course, all this is secured, using SSL for transport-level security, client certificates and JSON Web Tokens for authentication, and authorization based on MQTT topics. Taken together this lays a solid foundation for building new full-stack capabilities with ease.
Note that Transitive is not a replacement for ROS, and in fact many of our capabilities run ROS nodes on the robot. Neither is Transitive a fleet management system. It just makes it easy for you to build your own!
To learn more about our first release of the self-hosted version, please see the linked blog post. If you just want to try it out quickly please go to https://portal.transitiverobotics.com/register to create a free account, which will also give you some starting credit for try out any of our premium capabilities, such as webrtc-based video streaming, our web-terminal, or file-sync ("Dropbox for robots").
I'll be watching this thread for responses, or you can use the contact info at the bottom of the blog post to get in touch. Would love to hear your feedback!