Do you know which operating system is used by all the robots on the market?
It is estimated that the answer most people give is Android. From the point of view of the products on the market, based on the Android system development of the robot is indeed the mainstream, but there is another operating system is little known. It is called ROS (Robot Operating System Robot Operating System), is designed specifically for robotics, a set of open source operating system, to date, has been born eight years.
ROS is the predecessor of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in order to support STAIR (Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Robotics Program) and the establishment of the Switchyard (Switchyard) project. To understand the evolution of ROS, we have to start in 2007.
At that time, Morgan Quigley, Eric Berger and Andrew Ng published a paper on STAIR, which was about using the Switchyard to transfer information between software programs to help robots efficiently complete complex tasks.
Initially, the project was a collaboration between Stanford University and the Personal Robots Program of Willow Garage, a robotics company, and was promoted entirely by that company after 2008. By 2009, the ROS operating system was introduced when relevant documents mentioned that Switchyard would allow robots to be compiled modularly and without the need to redesign the framework.
In 2012, the ROS team became independent from Willow Garage and formed a non-profit organization (OSRF). After a few years of development, ROS has gone from being a niche operating system that no one asked for to being one of the mainstream robotics operating systems.
According to market research, many robotics companies have adopted ROS to develop products for brand new markets.
Such as ClearPath, Rethink, Unbounded, Neurala, Blue River, the most typical is Willow Garage's PR2 robot.
There are also figures that show that in 2015 alone, relevant venture capital organizations invested more than $150 million in robotics companies based on the ROS operating system.
In addition, a number of large companies have begun to notice the operating system, for example, Nvidia, Bosch, Qualcomm, Intel, BMW and DJI.
Of course, ROS can not be popularized without the support of developers. According to incomplete statistics, in May this year, more than 70,000 independent IPs around the world downloaded ROS program packages for 9 million times.
In addition, 1840 members of the ROS developer community have written 10 million lines of code.
What are the features of ROS? As a matter of fact, ROS is as open source as Android, and its features are similar in that it provides hardware abstraction, underlying device control, common feature implementation, inter-process messaging, and packet management.
Its uniqueness lies in its ability to support multiple languages, such as C++, Python, Octave, and LISP, and even a mix of languages, which can simplify the work of developers.
Because it is a Linux-based system, its reliability will also be higher and its size can be made smaller for embedded devices.
In addition, ROS is a distributed processing framework, developers can design executables individually. Processes in different nodes can receive and distribute various information (e.g. sensing, control, status, planning, etc.).
However, as of now, among the three major operating systems recognized in the industry for robotics - Ubuntu, Android and ROS , as of now, the majority of companies use the Android operating system.