Building a Robot Operating System for the Future

Depending on whom you ask, the Robot Operating System—or ROS—is kind of like the plumbing in a house. Or it’s like a set of Lego building blocks. Or the human nervous system.

However you describe it, ROS is everywhere. It's the shared system of underlying code that powers robots around the world, from the hobbyist creations in a garage to industrial robots at Toyota. It's also the focus of the latest episode of Ventures, a video series about startups from Bloomberg Technology.

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[justtestingonce]

Each time they show the code screen, the person has entered their password for turtlebot incorrect 😂😂

[EdwinFairchild]

i gave ROS a shot, and yes there is a learning curve, i think it would definitely be worth learning, but for my "playing around" purposes it was just too tedious to get up and running quickly. Not to mention the linux only thing is a big no no for me.

[cameromanuel]

Does anyone forsee an evolution in ROS similar to the evolution of code in the last few decades such as from COBOL to Ruby?

[failogy]

One question here. How did prof. of psychology become a robot plumbing programmer ?

[curiosityavalanche]

ROS is more tailored for industrial applications, not general purpose robotics.

[doncollins]

Another "Linux" in the making

[corinaivonnegonzalez]

i got a robot it is tiny and blue cute

[anandananda]

And here we tinker with metal, to try to give it a kind of life, and suffer those who would scoff at our efforts. But who's to say that, if intelligence had evolved in some other form in past millennia, the ancestors of these beings would not now scoff at the idea of intelligence residing within meat?

[bgrant]

ROS is a very cobbled together system with a number of problems. 1st and foremost being that its Linux based . That means you will spend more time trying to get thing's to download and compile than you will actually working with ROS. Then there is ROS itself, the system of workspaces and linking things together is un intuitive and clunky. Whatever time you dont flush down the drain in Linux will be spent here. The least amount of time will be actually coding for whatever your trying to do. Its a shame MS hasnt stepped up and Rolled their own version of ROS.

[Ryuuken]

Ross code in a self driving car, disaster. The software is starting to show its age.