Robot Operating System – A flexible framework for writing robot software
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Re: Robot Operating System – A flexible framework for writing robot software
#2A small recent-ish discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15530813
Re: Robot Operating System – A flexible framework for writing robot software
#3Anyone using this.. what have you built?
Re: Robot Operating System – A flexible framework for writing robot software
#4Anyone using this.. what have you built?
The whole ROS ecosystem is huge, most of research platform robots are ROS enabled.
Check the PR2 (http://wiki.ros.org/Robots/PR2), Turtlebot (https://www.turtlebot.com/), the Nao series (http://wiki.ros.org/nao), even Boston Dynamic's Atlas robot (http://gazebosim.org/tutorials?tut=drcsim_atlas_siminterface...) or Nasa's Robonaut (http://wiki.ros.org/Robots/Robonaut2).
It facilitates work by not having to rewrite a bunch of code every time. Also, most robotic related libraries like OMP, or TF are supported.
Re: Robot Operating System – A flexible framework for writing robot software
#5To get ROS and a few more robot related software tools and libraries as nice binary packages robotpkg might also be of interest: http://robotpkg.openrobots.org
Re: Robot Operating System – A flexible framework for writing robot software
#6Anyone using this.. what have you built?
It's a huge ecosystem of components, but from what I understand it's pretty ubiquitous in the research robotics and commercial space.
My startup is using it to power an autonomous customer service robot. ROS modules handle things like pose calculations, trajectory planning, collision avoidance, and basically all other interaction between software and hardware. From my perspective as a developer on the user-facing software, it's basically a simple event bus and RPC framework that has a load of prebuilt datatypes and modules for handling common robotics tasks.
Caveats – a lot of modules seem to follow pretty sketchy coding practices compared to what I'm used to in other industries. It seems to be a bit of a paragon of bad design. There also seems to be a lot of version confusion – lots of packages seem to support different subsets of versions, with most of the community possibly on older releases. There's an ongoing ROS 2.0 effort that I think uses MQTT as the transport. But I'm not a ROS expert, so take the above with a grain of salt!
Re: Robot Operating System – A flexible framework for writing robot software
#7How does this relate to, or compare with, say, BrainOS?
(Please forgive the newbie question. I’m totally completely ignorant about robotics operating systems but interested to learn.)
Re: Robot Operating System – A flexible framework for writing robot software
#8Anyone using this.. what have you built?
It's a huge ecosystem of components, but from what I understand it's pretty ubiquitous in the research robotics and commercial space. My startup is using it to power an autonomous customer service robot. ROS modules handle things like pose calculations, trajectory planning, collision avoidance, and basically all other interaction between software and hardware. From my perspective as a developer on the user-facing sof…
Yeah, ROS is a very good example of worse being the enemy of good (to mangle some sayings). It's a common framework which does basically everything you'd want to do in a robotic system, with a bunch of useful functionality on top of it, but basically every part of it is incomplete, poorly documented, awkwardly designed, and buggy. However, since there's basically nothing else which addresses the same space, people feel compelled to use it. I know of two robotics projects, one with a pretty substantial budget, which have been basically hamstrung by developing initially on ROS and running headlong into its limitations while being unable or unwilling to pay the cost of moving off of it.
Re: Robot Operating System – A flexible framework for writing robot software
#9Anyone using this.. what have you built?
Ive done my bachelor's thesis in 2013 on this. We were working on a robot built for exploration of disaster sites (earthquake, fire, ...).
I built:
1) Virtual camera: The robot was equipped with 6 fixed cameras. You can position virtual camera anywhere in the coordinate space and it constructs it's image with the information from the real cameras.
2) System for semi-automatic external calibration of cameras from LIDAR sensor. External calibration is the process of estimating the position and orientation of the camera. This system was not as precise as calibration using calibration patterns in lab, but it was useful when the robot was in the wild and you wanted to adjust the camera or strap a new camera on it quickly. However, to be frank I am not sure ft the system was ever actually used that way. I left the lab after finishing my thesis.
The ROS ecosystem is reasonably simple to understand and definitely makes things much easier. Apart from having some issues with compatibility between versions and incomplete functionality I remember it as quite a nice platform. On the other hand I have not tried any of it's competitors if there are any.
Re: Robot Operating System – A flexible framework for writing robot software
#10How does this relate to, or compare with, say, BrainOS? (Please forgive the newbie question. I’m totally completely ignorant about robotics operating systems but interested to learn.)
I don't know BrainOS, but the most obvious difference is that ROS is open source, so you can prototype or tinker with it easily. BrainOS seems to be a totally closed solution, and details are sparse on what it actually runs and does.
ROS has a BSD license, so it is even possible that BrainOS is actually using some ROS package or resources. After a quick look, most SW positions at BrainOS mentions than having a prior experience with ROS is a plus.