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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

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!

rcxdude 8y ago
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.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  So basically, ROS is the UNIX of robotics (i.e. "worse is better", + judging by how many serious projects using it are mentioned elsewhere in this comment thread)?
  - rcxdude 8y ago
    Kind of. Fundamentally, it has never had much competition due to the narrowness of the scope. It is ubiquitous in university robotics due to its accessibility, but in my experience most (successful) industrial robotics applications will simply provide an interface to ROS: internally they will not use it at all. One thing with ROS is that reimplementing it is not particularly difficult: I have, for various reasons and projects (in some cases before ROS was available) implemented basically all the core components of it (to similar levels of completeness and reliability). So the cost of doing it yourself is actually not all that high (and I think people overestimate it).

rcxdude 8y ago

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.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
So basically, ROS is the UNIX of robotics (i.e. "worse is better", + judging by how many serious projects using it are mentioned elsewhere in this comment thread)?
- rcxdude 8y ago
  Kind of. Fundamentally, it has never had much competition due to the narrowness of the scope. It is ubiquitous in university robotics due to its accessibility, but in my experience most (successful) industrial robotics applications will simply provide an interface to ROS: internally they will not use it at all. One thing with ROS is that reimplementing it is not particularly difficult: I have, for various reasons and projects (in some cases before ROS was available) implemented basically all the core components of it (to similar levels of completeness and reliability). So the cost of doing it yourself is actually not all that high (and I think people overestimate it).