Observation by a non ROS user: ROS is basically a hardware abstraction layer and set of common software components used by academics across many different manuf

Observation by a non ROS user: ROS is basically a hardware abstraction layer and set of common software components used by academics across many different manufacturers' hardware. Overwhelmingly it is used with third party robot arms to aid programming by people who want to focus on the maths and not the deployment, however it can be used for my sorts of situations. In reality, industry generally doesn't care about nominally innovative academic approaches to robotics, or even very much about hedging their lock-in with a vendor-neutral codebase, they just buy something that already works and use the software tools from the hardware vendor. Source: I went to a ROS conference last year and there was ~nobody using it in industry. The amount of money they were spending on hardware was staggering. I run a robotics company, we don't use ROS.