There’s some exciting revelations osmosing up the pipe with the latest revelations from those crazy kids down at Willow Garage.

ROS is a delightfully open source, clean-interfaced operating system for robots that could be poised to become a major cross platform OS. Wait, there’s more. In addition, Willow Garage is also floating the idea of a “robot app store” that I imagine could take a lot of wheel reinvention out of the robot programming process.
From H+ Magazine:

“Right now, cobbling together the various pieces of software needed to make a robot work is a complex process. If you buy commercial robotics hardware (like, say, the Nao humanoid robot from Aldebaran Robotics, which I’ve done some work with lately myself), then certain functions come with the robot’s pre-packaged control software. But, to get the robot to do anything else, you need to either write your own code, or download other folks’ code and integrate it yourself. It’s a process that generally requires considerable expertise and a lot of fiddling and trial and error. The situation is no better if you build your own robot according to your own plans or open-source ones. The “robot app store” idea aims to simplify the process of making robots functional.”

Mister Robotics has Views on robot operating systems of all kinds. His Views are very well reasoned and thought out, however I’ll let him do his own damn post so he can bring you the full nuance of his position. His short answer is that robots don’t need an OS because it ads an extra layer of complexity that doesn’t need to be there, and if one is any good at coding one can get the bot to do whatever one wants. Please keep in mind, however, that Mister Robotics also hand codes the HTML (html!) for every single site he’s ever done, and thinks that cars with computers are cheating. For what it’s worth, he also wears Bill Cosby sweaters around the house and is growing a lawn out front for the specific purpose of yelling at kids to get off it, so he’s coming from a special place, as are most robot guys with his background. Let the religious wars begin.

Okay, now, robot OS philosophical tangle aside, app store. Sounds great, but this next concept is really cool (assuming you have enough reliable code in your robot to make it smart enough to be able to identify problems and search on a consistent basis):

Or, more futuristically, robots themselves could go online in real-time and download new apps enabling them to solve problems that are stumping them at the moment. Maybe your Nao is trying to pick up some jello and can’t do it — the jello keeps slipping between his fingers. Instead of crying “Help!” to its programmer, it can go to the robot app store and enter the search terms “grasp slippery” — and find that my Nao’s “slippery object grasping” app is highly rated, and then download it and use it.

Or maybe you have another sort of robot (say, a PR3) rather than a Nao — but your PR3 has three-fingered hands similar to the Nao. Then, your robot should be able to download my Nao’s “slippery object grasping” routine too, if they’re both running the same robot operating system, or at least interoperable OS’s.

These two concepts are Wilow Garage’s way od addressing the state of robotic programming standards nowadays, to wit:

Today: We have a messy situation, with various robots running various pieces of control software combined using various (often custom-built) frameworks.

Whoa that sounds familiar. Hey robot! The 80s called! They want their software and hardware evolution timeline back eventually, but you can borrow it for now!

[via the twitter prolific @timoreilly]

This entry was posted on Friday, August 28th, 2009 at 2:56 am and is filed under Neat Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.