Powering the world's robots - 10 years of ROS

From space robot challenges to autonomous driving, industrial assembly, and surgery, the mission of Robot Operating System (ROS) (1) is to power the world’s robots. The open-source robotics middleware (rather than an operating system, as its name suggests) was initially developed 10 years ago on the basis of work at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and additional efforts by the Willow Garage. Since 2013, ROS has been managed by the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF), now called Open Robotics, which supports “the development, distribution, and adoption of open-source software for use in robotics research, education, and product development.” The great flexibility of ROS has promoted code sharing and contributions from researchers covering all major aspects of robotics. ROS helps the robotics community progress faster by sharing solutions to common problems. The development process of a robotic application can be simplified by utilizing ROS modules for sensing, navigation, motion planning, collision detection, and simulation (Fig. 1). For example, in the early years, ROS was adopted for the development of mobile robots such as the PR2 robot, which was built along with ROS by Willow Garage. By using ROS, PR2 can perform household chores such as serving drinks and folding laundry (2). ROS now comes with drivers for a wide range of sensors, simulators, and algorithms for navigation tasks that allow users to focus on their own unique aspects of research rather than worry about mundane component implementation. Support for different hardware manipulators has also been pursued in parallel, with recent efforts on standardizing the application program interfaces via ROS Industrial (ROS-I) and motion-planning tools such as MoveIt. Recently, ROS has been used to build open-source self-driving platforms (e.g., the Baidu Apollo project) that provide comprehensive, secure, and reliable solutions for autonomous vehicles