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While we work on an interface for Ubik, you can find comfort in ROS 2 and its wonderful community. Your first stop should be the official site
https://www.ros.org
ROS 2 is called a middleware and it is a bit like a town square. It is a hub that allows for the exchange of stuff to occur in one place. As long as you know the rules and the language, it becomes an easy task to bring in any party you want and let it get involved. Since robotics consists of an interplay of signal and commands, it is a big relief that it exists.
ROS 2 does however not actually do anything with the robot by itself. It just provides a way for different software and hardware solutions to collaborate creating a system.
Here are some of those solutions that you can use to test what you want using ROS 2.
It's an open-source robotic manipulation platform for ROS 2, designed for motion planning, manipulation, 3D perception, kinematics, and control. It enables users to develop advanced industrial and service robotics applications, providing tools for prototyping, collision checking, and benchmarking through a modular, BSD-licensed framework maintained primarily by PickNik Inc.
While it does allow to test and become familiar with object manipulation, the actual motion is generated in sort of a classical way: planning and executing. This results in the usual sequences that are associated with robotic motion. Still cool though.
It's an open-source 3D robotics simulator integrated with ROS 2, allowing for accurate simulation of robots in complex environments. It uses plugins to bridge Gazebo simulation data (sensors, kinematics) with ROS topics/services. It enables testing algorithms, control systems, and navigation in simulation before deploying on physical hardware.
We'll upload soon the files that you can use to combine Gazebo and Moveit for simulating some simple pick and place tasks.
Nav2 is the production-grade, open-source navigation framework for ROS 2, designed to allow mobile robots to autonomously navigate through environments. It enables robots to move from point A to B, calculate paths, avoid dynamic obstacles, and handle localization.
Indeed it is planned to build a wheeled platform that you can attach one or two robot arms to. It will be rugged, so that you can use it inside as well as off-road. With Nav2 you have a way to prepare for using it.
Is the primary 3D visualizer for the ROS 2 framework, used to display sensor data, robot states, maps, and planned paths in real-time. It allows debugging and monitoring of robot behavior by rendering 3D scenes, acting as the "eyes" of the robot.
This is also a very cool platform that you will enjoy using to visualize the point cloud generated by an RGB-D camera, among other things.
Many companies and institutions, including NASA, have made their robotics applications using ROS 2. There is also a whole branch of the community that, called ROS Industrial (https://rosindustrial.org), that focuses on industrial applications of ROS 2.
It's just wonderful that it is all open-source and just waiting for us to try things out.
If you would like to take some formal courses there some options like The Construct.
A bit like the story with Python2 and Python3, improvements over the years made necessary to rebuild the whole thing. The spirit is the same as with the first iteration of the middleware. But there are some differences that make it advisable to start with ROS 2 if you are new to ROS in general. If you are not new and have been using ROS1 I guess it's ok to be a bit annoyed because you might need to update your system.
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