Although Ubuntu is best known for its desktop/server distro—which was recently updated to 15.04—the last few years have seen the project's ambitions have grown considerably. For example, there's the Ubuntu phone, which is beginning to win plaudits. In turn, solving the particular demands for a mobile platform led to new approaches and technologies that appeared again in Snappy Ubuntu, a "transactionally updated Ubuntu for clouds and devices."

One category of "devices" supported by Snappy Ubuntu is drones. The connection between free software and drones goes back some way, and has now been formalised with the creation of the Dronecode project: "an open source, collaborative project that brings together existing and future open source drone projects under a nonprofit structure governed by The Linux Foundation. The result will be a common, shared open source platform for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)." Dronecode's Technical Steering Committee is headed by Andrew Tridgell, best-known as the creator of Samba, the GNU/Linux-Windows interoperability suite of programs.

Working in conjunction with the Ubuntu team, the Spanish company Erle Robotics has now brought a new feature to drones running Ubuntu: the ability to run special apps. With the €399 Erle-Copter Ubuntu Core Special Edition, users can install drone apps—which add new functions and behaviours—using any device with a browser connected to the drone. Programming the drone apps is done through the Robot Operating System (ROS)—the same platform that was used for the robotic kitchen that Ars featured recently.

Víctor Mayoral Vilches, CTO of Erle Robotics, says that ROS is a key breakthrough for robotics and thus drones: "In a few years ROS has changed the robotics field. It has unified universities and industry around the world, enhanced collaboration, sharing of algorithms and reuse of code. A task that traditionally could take months can be developed within days using ROS." To use ROS with the new Erle Robotics drone, ROS will delivered in Snappy Ubuntu as an installable framework.

Mayoral Vilches told Ars that he's a big fan of Snappy Ubuntu: "We've been working with different file systems and embedded OS distributions for the last months and Snappy matches our needs for robot and drone app development. It's lightweight and provides transactional updates which is something the robotics community have been asking for a long time. It even provides a marketplace where people would be able to monetize their applications and behaviours."

The combination of Snappy Ubuntu and the Robot Operating System is a good example of the power of open systems to work together. That's something that is much harder to achieve in the world of proprietary software, where complicated and costly licensing negotiations are generally required to reach an agreement.