  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 ROS1 Melodic and Noetic, as well as
ROS2 Foxy and Galactic) 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.
