When developing software for embedded systems, building libraries (such as OpenCV) can be quite slow, leading to an often-times out-of-date version of a library being used on the device. This of course leads to other issues in development stemming from differing versions of a library in the test environment (someone’s laptop) and the production environment (a Pi on a robot). Docker has already been used to solve similar problems on the cloud scale; why not use it for embedded?

The folks at Balena have already done great work for IoT devices, and I built upon their work to create base container images containing common robotics software packages such as OpenCV and ROS. I presented my work at the World Maker Faire in New York City in 2018.