What XPARO is
XPARO is a web platform for people who build robots. Add the xparo ROS 2 package to a robot and you can see your whole fleet live, design robot behaviour as visual behaviour trees with your team, send tasks, take over with teleoperation or a remote terminal, and record sensor data to the cloud. Small projects run on the free tier; larger ones pay for storage with credits.
Alongside the platform we publish free robotics tools and the guides that go with them. They are for anyone, whether or not you use XPARO: students wiring their first motor driver, makers building an ESP32 rover, and engineers who want a quick answer without opening a spreadsheet.
Who is behind it
XPARO is built and run by Pankaj Jangir, its founder and developer, from Jaipur, Rajasthan, India. It started as a personal project to make building and operating robots easier, and grew into the platform and toolset you see here. You can read more on the founder page.
The free tools
Each tool does one job, explains its formulas on the same page, and runs entirely in your browser, so nothing you type is uploaded.
- Battery Backup Calculator: List your electronics with voltage and current draw, get idle, typical and peak runtime from a battery.
- Electronics Calculators: Ohm's law, voltage dividers, resistor colour codes and capacitor codes in one place.
- ROS 2 Package Generator: Generate package.xml, build files and node stubs (ament_python or ament_cmake), downloaded as a zip.
- ROS Map Editor: Load a .pgm + .yaml SLAM map, erase stray LiDAR points, paint keep-out zones and export it again.
- PID Tuning Simulator: Tune P, I and D on simulated motors and plants and watch overshoot, rise and settling time change live.
- Web Serial Monitor: Connect to an Arduino or ESP32 over USB, send and receive data, log and plot it, right in the browser.
- Quaternion ↔ Euler Converter: Convert quaternions to roll, pitch, yaw and back (ROS conventions), with rotation matrix and tf2 snippets.
- Motor & Wheel Sizing Calculator: Work out the torque, speed and power each drive motor needs from mass, wheel size, slope and acceleration.
- Differential Drive Calculator: Convert cmd_vel to wheel speeds and back, find the turning radius, and turn encoder ticks into odometry.
- Behaviour Tree Visualizer: Paste BehaviorTree.CPP or Groot XML and see it as a tree, with checks for common mistakes.
How we write the guides
There are 50 guides so far, five for each tool. Each guide explains one idea in depth, with the formulas, a worked example with real numbers, and the mistakes people make in practice. We use AI writing tools to help draft the guides, and the author reviews every one before it is published. The formulas and worked examples are checked against the calculators on this site. The behaviour-tree examples were run on BehaviorTree.CPP 4.10, and the packages made by the ROS 2 generator were built on ROS 2 Jazzy.
If you find a mistake or something out of date, please tell us. We correct the article and update it.
Why there are ads
The tools and guides are free to use. Ads on these public pages help pay for the servers, so we can keep it that way. We don't put ads inside the fleet dashboard, on login pages or on your project pages, and we don't sell your data. Our Privacy Policy explains how advertising cookies work and how to opt out of personalised ads.
Contact
Email [email protected] or use the contact page. We aim to reply within a day or two.