05 December 2025
I presented airo-mono last week at the Research Software Engineering day 2025 in Heverlee (Leuven, Belgium).
airo-mono is a repository containing Python packages for robotic manipulation, with the motto "Keep Simple Things Simple." It is used extensively at IDLab-AIRO by PhD students and master students alike.
It's not trying to be a replacement for ROS. Instead, it's intended for smaller projects. Imagine you simply want to test a new sensor on a robotic arm, or evaluate a new computer vision pipeline. With airo-mono, you can just pip install airo-robots and be on your way.
There's trade-offs that come with developing research software. How do we convince everyone to contribute clean code to open source packages, when PhD students want and need to publish papers instead? How do we decide what to include - and more importantly, what not? I talked about all of these questions in Leuven.
The slides of this talk are available here. Read more about airo-mono here.