patrickelectric/blueos-docker

BlueOS is an operating system for robots and unmanned vehicles. It runs on a small computer attached to the vehicle itself and acts as the central hub for managing everything, video feeds, communications, navigation, and control. If you're building or operating an autonomous boat, submarine, or drone, BlueOS gives you a dashboard to monitor and control it from a separate ground-station computer. At a high level, it works by sitting between your vehicle's autopilot hardware (things like ArduPilot or PX4) and whatever device you're using to pilot from. It routes the video stream and telemetry data so you can see what the vehicle sees and send commands back. The system is built in a modular way, meaning individual components can be updated or extended without replacing the whole thing. It's designed to run on small, affordable computers like a Raspberry Pi 3 or 4, keeping CPU usage low while staying responsive. The people who would use this are anyone operating unmanned vehicles, marine researchers piloting underwater ROVs to inspect reefs, hobbyists building autonomous boats, or engineers working with drones and ground rovers. Blue Robotics, the company behind it, sells ready-made vehicles like the BlueROV2 and BlueBoat that work with BlueOS out of the box. But because it also supports generic ArduPilot and PX4 setups, you can use it on custom-built vehicles too. Someone building a custom survey boat, for example, could install BlueOS on their onboard computer and get a polished interface for piloting and monitoring without building that software themselves. One notable thing about the project is its philosophy of being "simple by default but powerful when needed." The interface follows standard design patterns so it feels familiar, but underneath it exposes a full services API for developers who want to customize or extend it. The project also offers three release tracks, stable, beta, and a bleeding-edge master version, so users can choose how much risk they're comfortable with. The system runs in containers, which keeps it portable across different hardware, though desktop Linux support is still noted as incomplete.