The out-of-box Linux VM instance for robotics related educational scenarios based on NanaBox.
Work In Progress
In 2018, as a college student in the sophomore year, I had selected a free elective course called ROS Robotics Efficient Programming taught by Dr. Relay Zhang. I was very impressed and benefited from this course because he will show the industrial robotics scenarios at every course beginning, then start the live C++ and Python coding demonstration in the Ubuntu environment with ROS Kinetic Kame installed. It's too hardcore for most students because they are used to deal with the easy courses, only the step of installing the Ubuntu environment with ROS Kinetic Kame, they will use over half a semester. I think it's waste of time for stucking at installing Linux distribution instead of touching the detail of robotics with ROS. I had no idea to improve that to make teacher confident for his course and his life, but he was very happy to meet me, and suggested me to use Autoware to build the Autonomous Driving solution in projects from the IoT and Connected Vehicle laboratory in the college.
In 2020, I had heard Hyper-V GPU-PV (paravirtualization) feature from DirectX ❤ Linux. I hoped I can use the similar stack to achieve the goal of my college laboratory teacher (not Dr. Relay Zhang) which is building Autonomous Driving solution for educational scenarios, but I cannot achieve that due to meet something force majeure. That's my regret.
In 2022, I started to build Hyper-V based virtualization software because VMware Workstation was more buggy than I thought. I have choose Hyper-V Host Compute System API because Ben (Bingxing) Wang told me this API is more easier than Hyper-V WMI Providers. This project is finally called NanaBox. I also wrote an e-mail to John Starks to diagnose some issues from Hyper-V Host Compute System API and started with these words:
I am trying to create an open-source third-party out-of-box-experience Hyper-V client based on Host Compute System recently for meeting my personal use and trying to create an autonomous driving framework for educational use based on it. (You may ask why I do it with Hyper-V HCS. Because GPU-PV and Linux Kernel Direct Boot are useful for me to achieve the goal.)
In 2025, Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) 2 has been open source, and I have learned a lot from the implementation. With my previous experience of using Hyper-V Host Compute System API, I think it's time to build the out-of-box Linux VM instance for robotics related educational scenarios based on NanaBox. I think it can resolve my regret in 2020 and also can give some help for my ROS college course teacher.
Because I think the project name of this idea should be started with R because the robotics is started with R. I think maybe I can called this project RelayLab because I hope this implementation can help Dr. Relay Zhang improve his course.
I also asked this name to a large language model called DeepSeek, and it came up with many other ideas for this name. So, I think this project name is OK to use.