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The Robot Operating System (ROS) has moved out of academics
- dang 7y agoA related thread from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17916456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17916456 Three smaller threads from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15890213 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15890213 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15749546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15749546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15530813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15530813 Quite small from 2016, but nicely counters the OP's baity title: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12080752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12080752 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6867480 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6867480 A similar article from last year: https://svrobo.org/a-history-of-ros-robot-operating-system/ https://svrobo.org/a-history-of-ros-robot-operating-system/ (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20490740 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20490740, but no comments there)
- andreyk 7y agoKind of a weird choice for the name, the title of the piece is "The hottest thing in robotics is an open source project you've never heard of" and "The Robot Operating System (ROS) has moved out of academics" is a sub-section (and makes more sense as such, since it's in contrast to ROS's origins, not any recent event). Aside from letting you know ROS exists this piece is fairly free of content, but I guess it's a neat thing to be aware of.
- dwrodri 7y agoThere is some really good discussion on this in the 2018 thread, but I'd really like to see a ROS 3 that conforms a little more to the more widely-used alternatives to the stuff they had to roll for themselves back in the day.
- kortex 7y agoAgreed. There are countless things in ROS1 which feel like a less polished version of X. I believe ROS2 is trying to use a more commodity stack for IPC and serde.
- ragebol 7y agoCan you name a few examples? For starters, I assume the IPC protocol in 'ROS classic'/ ROS1 will be on that list, as will catkin. What else?
- syntaxing 7y agoGenuinely curious, a lot of people kind of crap on ROS but what would be a better alternative?
- ebg13 7y agoI always found Oxford's MOOS to be easier to work with. That plus something like MIT's IvP Helm objective controller will get you an autonomous mobile platform very quickly.
- ragebol 7y agoCool thing about ROS is that is works for all sorts of robots, while MOOS [0] is focussed on autonomous marine vehicles. With ROS, I can have motion planning for a manipulator in hours, then put in on a mobile robot with whatever sort of locomotion etc all in the same system. [0] https://oceanai.mit.edu/ivpman/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Helm.MOOSIvPIntroduction https://oceanai.mit.edu/ivpman/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Helm.MOOS...
- ebg13 7y ago> MOOS [0] is focussed on autonomous marine vehicles Core MOOS is just an efficient low-overhead IPC middleware, exactly like core ROS but, in my experience, smaller and faster and easier to use. You can use it for literally any communication between multiple distributed processes, robotic or otherwise. I think ROS became more successful at first because of better branding and promotion by Willow Garage. Now it's all network effects. MIT's Ocean AI lab, by virtue of being an Ocean AI lab, uses MOOS for marine vehicles, but other groups have used it for other things as well.
- ragebol 7y agoThe answer from the old-fashioned people who didn't believe in open-source would be Microsoft Robotics Studio. MS killed that years ago. Now Microsoft is contributing to ROS2 IIRC with ROS2 running on windows too.
- arminiusreturns 7y agoI didn't know it was considered as more academic, seeing as I saw it in production on some next level stuff. At least it was dockerized and I didn't have to wrangle it.
- cptnapalm 7y agoIs ROS any easier and more reliable than it used to be? I've tried a few times, out of curiosity, to tinker with it, but have never been able to get the thing to work well enough to go through tutorials.