ROS support will be made available as an option to Ubuntu Advantage support customers. As a result, users already taking advantage of critical security updates and Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) fixes will now have a single point of contact to guarantee high quality fixes for ROS.
According to Canonical, this partnership means that the two companies will be able to support the robotics community by making ROS robots and services easier to build and package, simpler to manage, and more reliable to deploy.
"With ROS deployed as part of so many commercial products and services, it's clear that our community needs a way to safely run robots beyond their software End-Of-Life dates. Canonical's track record delivering ESM, together with our deep understanding of the ROS code base, make this partnership ideal. Ubuntu Linux has been central to the ROS project from the beginning, when we released ROS Box Turtle on Ubuntu Hardy over a decade ago" said Brian Gerkey, CEO of Open Robotics. "We’re excited to be part of this offering that will enable users to access quality support from both organisations."
ROS ESM is Canonical’s offering for ROS developers that enables them to access a hardened and long-term supported ROS system for robots and its applications on Ubuntu. ROS ESM provides backports for critical security updates, Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) fixes, and critical bug fixes for the ROS environment. By enabling Canonical’s ESM repositories users will get trusted and stable binaries for ROS and Ubuntu base OS distribution. ROS ESM is available for End-Of-Life distributions as well as Long-Term Support versions of ROS.
ROS is an open-source framework that helps researchers and developers build and reuse code between robotics applications and is a global open-source community of engineers, developers and academics.
