The Gazebo
Let's say you're a software developer or entrepreneur who daydreams "With today's technology, I bet I could make a robot that does something useful". Then you look for programmable robots on the market and find they're all either:
- STEM projects for children.
- VERY expensive products for military.
And they're always closed, proprietary systems, as in you have to buy their robot to try out their technology, you have to be in a relationship before tasting the goods.
On the other hand, Astral makes a system that is open to any robot hardware that you can install our SDK on. We support open-source platforms like PX4, Ardupilot, you name it. We sell a quadcopter, but only as reference hardware to save you the trouble of building your own. But what if you wanted to try out programming a robot without buying or building one? So then you look for drone simulators, and they're all either:
- for human pilots
- ...and that's it.
I'm almost exaggerating. There's one open-source simulator for robots, Gazebo. It's great, except it only runs on Ubuntu, and setting it up with a simulated programmable quadcopter to develop code you can then transfer to a real quadcopter is so hard it's basically impossible.
But despair not, intrepid dreamer, for we braved the cold waters of Gazebo for you, and put together a simulator - with our SDK preinstalled - that you can run anywhere in a virtual machine. This means you can create a drone app, run it in the simulator, see your simulated drone appear in the Astral mobile app, and then run that same code in a physical robot!
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)
Oh and our simulator is free. You can get it at https://astral.us/developers. We use it ourselves for the development of advanced features, which we'll cover in upcoming blogs.
So give it a spin, try one of our sample apps, and dream until your dreams come true.