  We argue that it is beneficial to tightly couple the widely-used Robot
Operating System with Conda, a cross-platform, language-agnostic package
manager, and Jupyter, a web-based interactive computational environment
affording scientific computing. We provide new ROS packages for Conda, enabling
the installation of ROS alongside data-science and machine-learning packages
with ease. Multiple ROS versions (currently Melodic, Noetic and ROS2 Foxy) can
run simultaneously on one machine, with pre-compiled binaries available for
Linux, Windows and OSX, and the ARM architecture (e.g. the Raspberry Pi and the
new Apple Silicon). To deal with the large size of the ROS ecosystem, we
significantly improved the speed of the Conda solver and build system by
rewriting the crucial parts in C++. We further contribute a collection of
JupyterLab extensions for ROS, including plugins for live plotting, debugging
and robot control, as well as tight integration with Zethus, an RViz like
visualization tool. Taken together, RoboStack combines the best of the
data-science and robotics worlds to help researchers and developers to build
custom solutions for their academic and industrial projects.
