The Origin Story of ROS, the Linux of Robotics

This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. Ten years ago, while struggling to bring the vision of the "Linux of Robotics" to reality, I was inspired by the origin stories of other transformative endeavors. In this post I want to share some untold parts of the early story of the Robot Operating System, or ROS, to hopefully inspire those of you currently pursuing your "crazy" ideas. This origin story starts when Eric Berger, my partner of seven years on this project, and I were starting our PhDs at Stanford.