Open source · package management

Pixi

Pixi is a fast, cross-platform package manager built on the conda ecosystem, developed by prefix.dev. I contribute to Pixi and led the paper describing its use for robotics and AI.

Why it matters

Robotics software stacks mix ROS, C++, Python, CUDA and machine-learning frameworks, and reproducing them across machines is notoriously hard. Pixi captures an entire environment in a lockfile and recreates it identically on Linux, macOS and Windows.

In my part of the ICRA 2026 keynote tutorial with Peter Corke, I showed live how Pixi and conda-forge compose ROS and PyTorch into portable workflows that run anywhere from phones and the browser to high-performance computing.

Publications

Selected papers from this line of work. See all publications.

arXiv 2025

Pixi: Unified Software Development and Distribution for Robotics and AI

Tobias Fischer, Wolf Vollprecht, Bas Zalmstra, Ruben Arts, Tim de Jager, Alejandro Fontan, Adam D. Hines, Michael Milford, Silvio Traversaro, Daniel Claes, and Scarlett Raine

arXiv 2511.04827

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