This project addresses the lack of commonality which has historically plagued the robotics research community due to the lack of sharable code. Robotics is an experimental endeavor, and code, the software that is written to control the robot, is at the core of any research or development effort. Innovation occurs best when the community builds on each others' accomplishments and robotics has progressed to the point that both researchers and developers can benefit from a shared, high-quality, common software toolbox to build useful and commercially viable applications with a minimum of duplicated engineering effort. This software is part of an open source "robotics commons": a shared resource from which all can benefit and to which are can contribute. To build this commons, this proposal begins with ROS (Robot Operating System), an open software platform comprising libraries and tools that facilitate building and running robot applications. Designed for both robotics researchers and application developers, ROS is already widely used around the world in classrooms, labs, and companies. Hence, the intellectual merit of the proposed project revolves around the software engineering methods used to build, improve, test, distribute, and support this high-quality robotics commons. In this project, development will focus on critical, under-served areas within ROS: flexible automation, user interfaces for non-experts, shared autonomy, robot teams, and improved platform support. Development will not focus on the algorithms available to the robotics community; rather, the intent is to provide the community with the best possible libraries and tools that embody state-of-the-art algorithms and techniques.
Just as the availability of the open source LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl/PHP/Python) enabled the internet revolution in the 1990s, ROS and its related tools are expected to have tremendous broader impacts to the engineering community. The OSRF will provide the worldwide robotics community with freely available open source tools that will enable a generation of robotics students, developers, entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts to more quickly and easily realize their aspirations.
