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Robot Operating System – A flexible framework for writing robot software

ros.org

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Re: Robot Operating System – A flexible framework for writing robot software

#11

Post by amarant »

Scea91 wrote: post #9
carlsborg wrote: post #3

Anyone 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 LIDA…

that's pretty cool! I'm particularly interested in how you made the virtual camera work?

can I read your thesis, or (dare i ask) source code?

Re: Robot Operating System – A flexible framework for writing robot software

#12

Post by protomikron »

My experience with ROS has been suboptimal. It's a collection of incompatible, outdated and buggy tools that communicate with each other via a single-point of failure (roscore) using a pub/sub mechanism.

Furthermore they use their own build system (catkin, WHY?), define their own IDL (WHY?), use their own dependency system (rosdep, WHY?) and even mess with your Bash environment.

I appreciate their effort and it is really hard to make a system that interfaces with all kinds of different robots and hardware, but I don't understand why they don't exploit existing high-quality solutions for the "not-robot-related" parts of their system. At the moment I don't think I would like to have ROS run a potential self-driving car.

Re: Robot Operating System – A flexible framework for writing robot software

#13

Post by ragebol »

carlsborg wrote: post #3

Anyone using this.. what have you built?

Home service robots, controlled via 'natural' language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0P2MqmQ-DI

Wall cleaning robot (still testing): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dMjt_Pj4og

There are some nice projects on https://discourse.ros.org/c/ros-projects, I really like Kyler Laird's Tractobots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPI7f5kQRKo

Re: Robot Operating System – A flexible framework for writing robot software

#14

Post by ragebol »

protomikron wrote: post #12

My experience with ROS has been suboptimal. It's a collection of incompatible, outdated and buggy tools that communicate with each other via a single-point of failure (roscore) using a pub/sub mechanism. Furthermore they use their own build system (catkin, WHY?), define their own IDL (WHY?), use their own dependency system (rosdep, WHY?) and even mess with your Bash environment. I appreciate their effort and it is re…

The build system is mostly macros on top of cmake. But not ideal indeed. Same for the IDL. ROS 2.0 [0] should adress a lot of those issues, also stuff like real-time, improved security, no roscore needed.

On the robots I worked with, I never missed any of those features, to be honest. Largest project of those is a research home service robot, quite different from a self-driving car in terms of reliability requirements. The real-time stuff for motor control there is handled by EtherCAT.

[0] https://design.ros2.org/

Re: Robot Operating System – A flexible framework for writing robot software

#16

Post by protomikron »

ragebol wrote: post #14
protomikron wrote: post #12

My experience with ROS has been suboptimal. It's a collection of incompatible, outdated and buggy tools that communicate with each other via a single-point of failure (roscore) using a pub/sub mechanism. Furthermore they use their own build system (catkin, WHY?), define their own IDL (WHY?), use their own dependency system (rosdep, WHY?) and even mess with your Bash environment. I appreciate their effort and it is re…

The build system is mostly macros on top of cmake. But not ideal indeed. Same for the IDL. ROS 2.0 [0] should adress a lot of those issues, also stuff like real-time, improved security, no roscore needed. On the robots I worked with, I never missed any of those features, to be honest. Largest project of those is a research home service robot, quite different from a self-driving car in terms of reliability requirement…

> The build system is mostly macros on top of cmake.

That makes it even worse. So it's crap on top of crap. CMake is mostly used to build cross-platform software, but I don't think anybody uses ROS on a system other than Linux, so why not just use established tools like simple `make`?

Re: Robot Operating System – A flexible framework for writing robot software

#18

Post by oarfish »

protomikron wrote: post #16
ragebol wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The build system is mostly macros on top of cmake. But not ideal indeed. Same for the IDL. ROS 2.0 [0] should adress a lot of those issues, also stuff like real-time, improved security, no roscore needed. On the robots I worked with, I never missed any of those features, to be honest. Largest project of those is a research home service robot, quite different from a self-driving car in terms of reliability requirement…

> The build system is mostly macros on top of cmake. That makes it even worse. So it's crap on top of crap. CMake is mostly used to build cross-platform software, but I don't think anybody uses ROS on a system other than Linux, so why not just use established tools like simple `make`?

It's not even really supported outside specific Ubuntu releases I think, so for anything else you're on your own mostly.

Re: Robot Operating System – A flexible framework for writing robot software

#19

Post by oarfish »

protomikron wrote: post #12

My experience with ROS has been suboptimal. It's a collection of incompatible, outdated and buggy tools that communicate with each other via a single-point of failure (roscore) using a pub/sub mechanism. Furthermore they use their own build system (catkin, WHY?), define their own IDL (WHY?), use their own dependency system (rosdep, WHY?) and even mess with your Bash environment. I appreciate their effort and it is re…

The bugginess aspect and often absent documentation and lack of tutorials which go beyond turtlebot is what irks me most. Sometimes, fundamental functionality such as message synchronization is just not useable.

Re: Robot Operating System – A flexible framework for writing robot software

#20

Post by cbames89 »

carlsborg wrote: post #3

Anyone using this.. what have you built?

NASA's Valkyrie, and Robonaut 2, in addition Fetch, and Baxter,a couple of industrial arms via ROS-i. I know that it's pretty horrid, but it's also the devil I know. This allows for rapid prototyping. In addition, the API hasn't changed much so I can walk away for months and come back and still use the robot. Several organizations support OSRF, but they're still just a couple of people. It's all open source so I've been able to document bugs and submit fixes. That being said, they're still robotics people doing a systems job, but I've failed so far in convincing systems people that robotics is the next mobile.
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