Despite the involvement of the military and private companies, the robotics field has had a remarkably open ethos. With robots in their toddler stage, it has still proven worthwhile to share research and techniques widely. The Open Source Robotics Foundation are working to keep it that way, with an open ethic that might just shape our future with robots.

IHMC Robotics, the second place team at the DARPA Robotics Challenge, used an Atlas robot but distinguished themselves with an advanced walking algorithm that gave them an edge over other Atlas teams, none of whom cracked the top five. But they’re not keeping the new software to themselves.

Atlas Robot

“We’re in the process of making an open source walking algorithm,” Jesper Smith, mechanical engineer for Team IHMC (Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition), told iDigitalTimes. “Our simulator will be open source, so in a month or so I hope you guys can just download our simulator into java--it runs on every computer--and play with our robot.”

Team IHMC Robot at the DARPA Robotics Challenge

But the future of robotics doesn’t need to rely on the generosity of individual robotics projects.

The Open Source Robotics Foundation works to spread the same ethos through non-profit R&D. Their mission is “to support the development, distribution, and adoption of open source software for use in robotics research, education, and product development.”

Steven Peters, software engineer at the Open Source Robotics Foundation, described their suite of programs, Robot Operating System (ROS), to iDigi at the DARPA Robotics Challenge in Pomona. “It can help you with perception, path planning, navigation.”

Fundamental open source robot software has already across numerous robot-related fields. “The first big users were in academia, universities, and research settings. And now it’s finding more use in commercial settings.”

The Open Source Robotics Foundation also makes efforts to integrate existing robot software, combining best practices from across robotics research.

Robot Operating System Teams Up

Remember IHMC and their new walking algorithm? “We’ve talked to them about integrating their algorithms with ROS,” Peters said.

The obstacle seems to be “making an interface from the ROS network messaging passing and [IHMC’s] Java algorithms.” But Peters sounded optimistic that Robot Operating System would soon include some of the best software work from the most advanced robotics competition ever held.

Though private robotics companies are an emerging force, universities still contributes a number of engineering innovations, the churn from new waves of students turning up innovations that were too easily lost. “I think for a long time robotics research involved a lot of reinventing the wheel,” Peters said.

“People would come in, you’d get a new grad student… and they’d be like ‘Okay, we’re going to build a new robot,’ and they’d have to build it all from scratch,” Peters said.

A Robot File Format

Not only is the Open Source Robotics Foundation pooling the best research, they’re working on establishing a universal foundation with “a common file format called Universal Robot Description Format (URDF).”

“I mentioned that a lot of teams are using ROS. But even teams that aren’t using ROS for processes on their machine, lots of them are still using URDF.”

The goal is a completely universal and ubiquitous software for the robot future. “If you can describe the kinematics and the way it moves, if you can describe that in URDF, then you can use it in rviz, you can use it in MoveIt!, which is a motion planner. Just having some common file formats makes it real easy to plug in to different programs.”

In 2013 Google acquired Boston Dynamics and its DARPA-funded Atlas robot, placing publicly-backed work in private hands. While the robot industry has been a model in open resource sharing so far, future economic growth will create new advantages for the proprietary.

The Open Source Robotics Foundation could become a competing future, one that offers the best robot technology to whoever should care to pursue it. But for now their goals are more modest, if no less ambitious. “Really we're just trying to build a platform and foundation that people can share.”