Willow Garage @ NRW: Why Open Source, Platform Independent Robotics Is The Future
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 19 of April , 2010 at 1:34 am
Willow Garage brought a PR2 to Stanford for National Robotics Week, and it’s one of the first times the robot has been on public display. Now that the hardware is pretty much finished, they’re working on creating and improving developer tools for ROS to make programming across multiple platforms as simple as possible. Here’s why this is important (from Jorge Cham of Ph.D Comics):
So, to summarize, ROS is attempting to ensure that robotics developers don’t have to waste time rewriting software (that may already exist on other platforms) from scratch. Also, now that PR2s are available to research institutions, developers don’t have to waste tons of time and money (lots of money) designing their own robots just to test out software. To that end, Willow Garage is thinking of making some PR2s publicly accessible as test robots. You’d develop PR2 software using a simulator, and when you were confident that you had it fairly bug free, you could schedule some time to teleoperate a real PR2 to test it out.
More (and it’s tasty!) after the jump.
Willow Garage sent me home with a couple PR2 candy bars, check it out:
Hmm, that’s more magnesium than I would’ve guessed, but I’m still waiting for the “lift skillet, cook breakfast” bit to work properly…
We’ve been promised a tour of Willow Garage sometime in the near future, so definitely stay tuned for that.
[ Willow Garage ]
Comments (13)
Category: Research
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Comment by Tom
Made Monday, 19 of April , 2010 at 4:24 am
Hi, as much as willow garage is the big thing at the moment, its a little unfair to do an article on distributed robotics development platforms without even mentioning the MS offering, which has been around for 3 years longer, and solves the same problems as this (albeit without drinking the free software coolaid).
Comment by Robotbling
Made Monday, 19 of April , 2010 at 6:07 am
Haha, that’s awesome – a PR2 chocolate bar. Looking forward to your tour.
Comment by Evan Ackerman
Made Monday, 19 of April , 2010 at 7:56 am
Well, this article wasn’t intended to be an overview of development platforms or anything… Willow Garage was at a NRW event at Stanford last week that I was at, hence this post. And it’s true that at the moment, Willow Garage and ROS are fairly high profile when it comes to robotics development. I’d love to post more about similar projects from MS, and I certainly will if I see anything in the news or you can always email me tips directly.
Also, how come free software = coolaid?
Comment by Chris Bruner
Made Monday, 19 of April , 2010 at 9:12 am
In order for a common platform to be developed for developing Robots, the free software coolaid must be drunk. I looked at MS’s offering, and while it has lots of coolness, it is a windows based environment, which is limiting and is C# which isn’t cross platform and has patent infringement worries attached to it.
I’d rather a cross platform development system, that uses a none propitiatory language, (C C++, Python, Lua, for example).
Comment by kwc
Made Monday, 19 of April , 2010 at 10:48 am
Hi Evan, thanks for dropping by! Looking forward to seeing in person over here at WG.
As for the MS discussion, why should there only be one robotics software platform? I, for one, think the Web is much healthier now that there are so many competitors to IE (it helps that many of them are open source as well). The same goes for robotics. There’s a vibrant open-source community (YARP, OpenRAVE, Orocos, ROS, Player) that each have their strengths, and many are working on better integration to complement each others’ strengths.
Robotics is far from being a mature field, and having more options to innovate on top of will benefit the community as whole.
Comment by Jeff Kramer
Made Monday, 19 of April , 2010 at 11:03 am
kwc has the right of it – while Jorge’s comic explains things quite well, there are more than a few great open source (and not-quite-open source) offerings out there for robot APIs. ROS is just the best marketed.
Comment by Tom
Made Monday, 19 of April , 2010 at 11:49 am
I take your point about the story.
I wasn’t trying to imply that MS should be the only offering, or that its the best,just pointing out an alternative. Personally I use both MRDS and ROS at work, and they both have their pros and cons.
The cool-aid comment may have been a bit much, just that a lot of people dismiss MS tech simply because it isnt open source, regardless of its capabilities. There are quite a few companies/unis doing very good work with it.
Comment by fyeakoolaid
Made Monday, 19 of April , 2010 at 2:54 pm
The MS abomination needs to die and stay dead. Tying your research to a framework that you don’t have source code to is folly.
MS could have the best technology in the world and it still isn’t good enough, without source code and a reasonable license anyone developing for it is basically helping MS sell a product and chaining themselves to a future of constant upgrades at whatever prices MS determines. That is if MS decides to continue to support the product.
Comment by Andy
Made Tuesday, 20 of April , 2010 at 9:19 am
If we are gonna mention Microsoft Robotics Studio, we might as well mention player/stage which has been around even longer than that.
ROS is a good thing! Competition is great for the consumer. The fact that ROS comes with supported hardware is even better!
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