Robots can be about as complex a machine as you’re ever likely to encounter, but roboticists spend a lot of time solving mundane problems that have already been solved countless times by other robot makers. A recent New Scientist article documents the efforts of researchers around the globe that have begun to collaborate on the Robot Operating System (ROS), which they hope will provide a common platform for robot research, letting its users concentrate on advancing the state of the art instead of reinventing the wheel.Bringing robotics to this point won’t be easy, though. “Robotics is at the stage where personal computing was about 30 years ago,” says Chad Jenkins of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Like the home-brew computers of the late 70s and early 80s, robots used for research today often have a unique operating system (OS). “But at some point we have to come together to use the same resources,” says Jenkins.
Teams at Stanford University, MIT, and the Technical University of Munich, Germany are behind the effort.
ROS, which unsurprisingly is open source software, is a pretty good textbook example of a perfect arena for open source. Any benefit that a robot maker might reap from keeping some aspect of their operating software secret would seem to be vastly outweighed by the benefit of pooling resources with other researchers and spreading out the testing and debugging among the group, particularly for the features that are common to almost all advanced robots and don’t confer a particular competitive advantage.
That’s not to say that a commercial robotics OS is out of the question. Microsoft has created a Robotics Developer Center with toolkits for robot developers. To the extent that robot OSes are solving problems that are common with other, more mainstream computing devices that Microsoft already supports, this is likely to be a good starting point as well. I would suspect, however, that as robot technology advances, it may prove to be too small of a niche for a large company like Microsoft to be able to handle in-house.
Ultimately, whether the robot world rallies around an open source OS or a commercial OS will depend on the vibrancy of the developer community and the availability of “apps” that underlie more advanced capabilities.
They can’t call it ROS – that’s already the shortname for ReactOS
Maybe they can call it RobOS
…today, SkyNet is born
.
in all seriousness I am glad this endevor has begun. Though I must say, I do really like MS’s offering. http://www.microsoft.com/robotics/
now if only I could get my Roomba’s to fight eachother…
Edited 2009-08-10 18:45 UTC
It would be interesting to see how Microsoft would extend and embrace Skynet … Imagine if Ballmer became self aware.
The first link just links back to the OSnews article. Why didn’t the other commenters notice that
?
And whatever happened to your 1984 Apple posts?
Fixed. Thanks.
I think we’ve had something about Apple every day this past week. (Some are page 2 stories). It’s just hard to notice because we normally write about Apple a lot.
But I’m going to address the status of my call to arms in another editorial this week.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327206.300-robots-to-get-th…
Interesting.
Scientists don’t like MS (unless they get paid by MS)
“ROS currently only runs on Unix-based platforms. Software for ROS is primarily tested on Ubuntu and Mac OS X systems, though the ROS community has been contributing support for Fedora, Gentoo, Arch Linux and other Linux platforms.
While a port to Microsoft Windows for ROS is possible, it has not yet been explored. “
Robotics guys are bare to the metal. Unix is far more bare to the metal than windows is.
Access to hardware is much simpler with unix based OS’s, considering a driver is written and can be accessed from /dev/ Pretty simple and works quite well when screwing around and prototyping new interfaces.
Robot Laws
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law
4. Never use GOTO, especially in a public restroom.
5. It is not wise to show your source code to strangers.
6. Azimov > Heinlein > Bradbury
7. Mannekins tough, Humans chewy
I don’t usually do this… but it’s “Asimov”. It’s been 17 years since the world lost him and I guess I still think of him every day.
Darn, I let me spell checker correct it for me – I originially had Asimov. I gues my spell checker doesn’t do SciFi – or is it SyFy?
Just as a point of interest, Isaac made a distinction between “SciFi” and “science fiction”, at least according to one of his essays. (I don’t recall him belaboring the point.) SciFi being cheap trash. “science fiction” being the higher quality material where the science itself is respected.
I don’t think that he required it to be hard science fiction. But the stuff on TV which was basically an excuse for having some girl get her blouse ripped off and then run around half-naked on the screen, in a story which blithely ignored the most basic tenets of physics, was in the SciFi camp.
You’ve just described 75% of all TV shows and movies!
BTW, I’ve always categorized Science Fiction into 2 categories:
1. Westerns in Science – this is the classic laser-battle, shoot-em-up in space with action, adventure, etc.
2. Ideas about Science – the “what would the universe be like if…?”, “what if we could read each other’s minds?” stories. These were my favorites.
I’m not sure how relevant this is, but Arthur Clarke’s Rama series illustrates another dichotomy in science fiction. It starts out with “Rendezvous With Rama” which is classic Clarke. Awe inspiring ideas, with cardboard characters. Dear Arthur couldn’t develop a character to save his life, although the imagination of that man was impressive. But then, decades later, he teamed up with Gentry Lee for his first collaborative writing effort. Rama II was a tour de force. The vibrant characters, so human… came alive, right off the pages of the book. But Clarke’s mind expanding ideas are there as well. That state of affairs continues through “In the Garden of Rama”. And also through “Rama Revealed”, which in fact reveals the mind and objectives of God… and most interestingly, his limitations. Science fiction doesn’t get much more ambitious than that.
Edited 2009-08-11 08:26 UTC
SF the preferred abbreviation within the community of sf writers and readers. Much like the people insisting on GNU/Linux over Linux. (Yeah, we know that Linux is just a kernel!)
8. Terminate John Connor.
You forgot the Zeroth Law:
Other Laws would have to be modified to include an exception for the Zeroth Law, of course.
are probably shaking at the idea of being replaced by Intelligent bots.
Tell me about it. I conceived the idea. I assembled the parts. I programmed her. I know more about her than anyone on this earth. But gosh darn it! Despite my best efforts, her eyes are still blinking 12:00. Very distracting during those most intimate moments…
Edited 2009-08-10 21:23 UTC
Darn the modding rules, that’s a +1 funny if I ever read one!
I tried it on my computer (debian) and it is very easy to build decentralized service / listener nodes. I would consider it more like a framework than an OS, though.
I wonder what is the performance impact of running all nodes communication over TCP and publishing / subscribing to services using XMLRPC on embedded systems.
There is an experimental library for using ROS with Java.
In any case, this is a great project with a lot of potential!
Edit: link to the project http://ros.sourceforge.net/
Edited 2009-08-11 06:01 UTC