NewScientist.com has posted a story on the need for a standardised robot operating system and point to the, aptly named, Robot Operating System from Willow Garage and Stanford as a likely candidate.
We’ve mentioned Willow Garage and ROS several times before. It a development environment that loads on top of an operating system such as GNU/Linux to provide a standardised set of APIs forming a “meta operating system” for robot software. ROS source code is available under the BSD license, making it Free Software and Open SourceSoftware.
While not mentioned in the article, there are other contenders for a freely available, community developed robot API standard including the well-known Player/Stage, Orca, MARIE, Orocos, and OpenJAUS, among others.
Contenders vs Community, posted 14 Aug 2009 at 16:21 UTC by steve »
Astute robots.net reader Herman Bruyninckx points out:
“Thanks for bringing these ROS efforts to a broader public 🙂 But you should rephrase some of the sentences: the “other contenders” are not contenders, but partners! For example, ROS and Orocos have built bridges to each other (and have had developers working at each other’s place), and similar things have happened with Player and others.
So, all these projects are really working together, to make their core functionality interoperable. All of them together will be the future open source operating system, unbeatable by proprietary vendors :-)”
Another project that is starting off with a huge potential is Blender for Robotics
