The operating system for intelligent robotic systems

Announcements

Hello, world! We have launched after a year in research and development.
Botnix works out-of-the-box using standard NixOS conventions and is currently in active development.
We are working on our first major release: Botnix 1.0 Torbjörn (pronounced torr-beyourn, meaning "Bear of Thor")
Join us in building the future of robot operating systems!

Introduction

Botnix is the first operating system (OS) and Linux distribution for multi-agent and -domain autonomous systems, intelligent robotic systems, or embodiment as it is known in the artificial intelligence (AI) research community. Botnix stands for "Robot Linux" or "Robotics Linux". Our goal is to create the ideal OS for intelligent robotic systems in-the-wild, built on the widely deployed and field-tested Linux kernel and the powerful Nix software deployment model. Botnix provides the Botpkgs or "Bot packages" software repository, a domain-specific subset of the 80,000+ packages found in the Nixpkgs repository. Botnix is a single-purpose, battle-hardened variant of NixOS using the same declarative design. It is a production-grade OS that supports state-of-the-art research in AI for robotics.

Botnix is designed with the future in mind. As a community of Builders, we aim to accelerate the development and deployment of AI for robotics. The Botnix software and community are free and open-source. We welcome contributions from all individuals, organizations, and industries. We are grateful for your support!

Background

While compute and energy constraints have historically limited robotic systems to legacy real-time OSes running on underpowered microcontrollers, these constraints are rapidly vanishing with development of new low-power processor architectures, domain-specific accelerators, unified memory, and high-speed interconnects, as demonstrated by the NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchip, Apple M1 system-on-chip (SoC), and AMD chiplet technology. This revolution in computing is powering a new Age of Embodied Intelligence. We aim to be the operating system (OS) of the robotics revolution.

Embodied AI: Botnix is intended to be the first OS with native, batteries-included support for robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) at both the high- and low-level. We aim to bring the robotics and AI software ecosystems out of piecemeal, standalone packages and libraries and into a cohesive whole at the OS level. This includes boilerplate interfaces necessary to communicate between popular software systems used in different robotics domains. We further aim to provide tools for physical intuition, such as real-time internal physics engines for hybrid neurosymbolic AI inference.

RoboDevSecOps: Botnix aims to be the ideal OS for AI and robotics developer-security-operations or RoboDevSecOps, as the safety of deployed systems is a primary consideration in AI and robotics alike. More than a package manager, the powerful Nix system enables us to provide a simple, declarative, stateful, reproducible OS with native depedency isolation (think of it as built-in containers), cloud over-the-air (OTA) updates, and rollbacks. We aim to buttress this system with robust kernel-hardening, penetration testing, monitoring, and CVE notification systems.

Inclusive Community: Any open-source project is only as good as its community. To make our shared vision a reality, we are creating a new community of talented contributors. We strive to create a community where all individuals, organizations, and viewpoints are welcome. We default to protecting your rights. To do so, we ask that all contributors make an effort to comply with the same well-defined Code of Conduct. Unlike other communities, we are not here to censor your speech by a set of abtrirary, ill-defined rules. Your voice matters to us. We want your opinions.

Why Botnix?

Like many of you, we are thrilled about recent advances in open-source AI and robotics, but have run across some challenges along the way:

The Robot Operating System (ROS) is not an OS at all, but rather, a collection of software packages. Getting ROS installed and configured for a particular OS can be a hassle. This increases the time needed to get up and running. ROS also provides no little to no tools to manage robot sofware deployment, requiring third-party tools with additional complexity and constraints.
RoboStack is a step in the right direction by using the Conda package manager for dependency management in C/C++ and Python projects. Unfortunately, it is an incomplete solution that introduces yet another package manager to be managed.
Configuring a machine for AI development and/or deployment can still be a significant burden. Common challenges include installing mutually compatible graphics drivers, CUDA libraries, and deep learning frameworks. An entirely separate package manager such as conda or micromamba is often used for dependency management. If we begin with the 'right' package manager (e.g., Nix), all of this added complexity becomes unnecessary.
Popular flight control system (FCS) software (e.g., ArduPilot, PX4, BetaFlight) projects remain focused on microcontroller-based real-time OSes for unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). ArduPilot and PX4 are based on ChibiOS and Apache NuttX, respectively, two hard real-time OSes designed for microcontrollers. Because of this, ArduPilot- and PX4-based systems still must rely on separate Linux companion computers for the heavy lifting. This is not the way.
Debian 12 ("bookworm") is our favorite release to date, but it remains a traditional Linux OS poorly suited to our use case.
While Ubuntu is the most popular Linux OS, and Ubuntu Core is intended for robotics among other things, it has all of the limitations of Debian plus proprietary Snaps, a closed source, and a high price. Robotics should be open to everyone.
The Yocto Project and the related OpenEmbedded layers for ROS is a major step in the right direction, but OSes must be hand-crafted and lack the powerful Nix system for configuring and deploying robotic systems, which we call RoboDevSecOps.
OSTree is yet another solution designed without robotics in mind that must be arduously adapted to our use case.
GNU Guix is the next best thing to NixOS with some theoretical advantages. In practice though, we found Guix to be less reliable and supported than NixOS. While the potential there, we were more comfortable moving forward with the large and rapidly growing Nix community.
Although we love unikernels or Library operating systems (libOSes), they are often slow and painful to deploy using common tools. Certaintly, automation can alleviate much of this headache and thankfully Nix does just that. That's right, you can use Nix to build and deploy MirageOS unikernels. The two systems are not mutually exclusive.

After careful consideration, we decided that the focus of Botnix substantially differs from that of NixOS and other communities, given our sole focus on AI for robotics. There are numerous drivers and applications that are relevant to a general-purpose OS, but not to our use case. Removing this overhead allows us to be more efficient. We want to accelerate robotics, and to do so, we must be focused.

Last, we felt that the Apache 2.0 license might be better suited to commercial adoption.

Manuals

Botnix Manual - TBA
Botpkgs Manual - TBA
NixOS Manual - how to install, configure, and maintain a purely-functional Linux distribution
Nixpkgs Manual - contributing to Nixpkgs and using programming-language-specific Nix expressions
Nix Manual - how to write Nix expressions (programs), and how to use Nix command line tools

Communities

Botnix Discord (a migration to Discourse is in discussion)
NixOS Discourse
NixOS Weekly
NixOS community wiki
NixOS community contact (Discord, Telegram, IRC, etc.)

Related Projects

All official NixOS project sources are maintained at the NixOS organization on GitHub:

Nix - a purely functional package manager
NixOps - a tool to remotely deploy NixOS machines
nixos-hardware - NixOS profiles to optimize settings for different hardware
Nix RFCs - the formal process for making substantial changes to the community
NixOS homepage - the NixOS.org website
hydra - the NixOS continuous integration (CI) system
NixOS Artwork - the NixOS artwork

Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD)

Botnix and Botpkgs are built and tested using GitHub Actions.

Nixpkgs and NixOS are built and tested using the Nix-based Hydra CI/CD system.

Artifacts successfully built with Hydra are published to the Nixpkgs https://cache.nixos.org/. When building and testing succeed, the Nixpkgs expressions are distributed via Nix channels.

Contributing

Botnix implements a Linux distribution for AI and robotics based on NixOS, Nixpkgs, and Nix. The GitHub Insights page gives a sense of the project activity.

Community contributions are strongly encouraged via GitHub Issues and Pull Requests.

For more information about contributing to the project, please visit the contributing page.

Roadmap

Create Botpkgs and make it the default package repository
Create OS flavours for Agent, Orchestrator, and Simulator operational models
Add packages, drivers for robotics and AI
Add packages for physics engines (embodiment) and game engines (self-simulation)
Add boilerplate interfaces for inter-modal communication
Add hardware and software security systems
Add robot operations or fleet management systems
Add labeled and unlabeled datasets, autolabeling systems

Tasks

Donations

Botnix is made possible by the Linux Foundation, NixOS Foundation, Nervosys, and countless contributors to related projects.

We need your support to ensure the success of Botnix development.

License

Botnix is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. The software it deploys may be licensed under a variety schemes, from open- to closed-source.

zlite/botnix