Welcome to Episode 84 of The Robotic Report Podcast, which brings conversations with robotics innovators straight to you. Be a part of us every week for discussions with main roboticists, modern robotics corporations, and different key members of the robotics neighborhood. Our visitor this week is Brian Gerkey, CEO and co-founder of Open Robotics and certainly one of creators of ROS. Brian tells us concerning the improvement and evolution of the Robotic Working System (ROS) and why open supply software program has performed such a pivotal function within the development of the robotics trade and within the acceleration of robotics analysis in college and company robotic labs around the globe. Now it's time to organize for RoboBusiness and the Discipline Robotics Engineering Discussion board, which run October 19-20, 2022 in Santa Clara, Calif If you want to be a visitor on an upcoming episode of the podcast, or you probably have suggestions for future friends or phase concepts, contact Steve Crowe or Mike Oitzman.

ROS, which stands for Robot Operating System, is a set of software libraries and tools that help you build robot application; Gazebo is a 3D robotics simulator. ROS and Gazebo are both open source and are widely used in the robotics community. Gerkey explains ROS and Gazebo and how they are used in robotics, as well as some of the design decisions of the second version of ROS, ROS2. Brian Gerkey is the CEO of Open Robotics, which seeks to develop and drive the adoption of open source software in robotics. Before Open Robotics, Brian was the Director of Open Source Development at Willow Garage, a computer scientist in the SRI Artificial Intelligence Center, a post-doctoral scholar in Sebastian Thrun's group in the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab.

Ten years ago today, an engineer at Silicon Valley robotics lab Willow Garage published a new code repository on SourceForge. The repository, made publicly available to anyone in the world who wanted to access it, hosted the codebase for a new project Willow was working on: ROS. The ROS code repo, set up by Ken Conley, ROS platform manager at Willow, on November 7, 2007 at 4:07:42 PT, was the first time the term ROS was used as a formal, public designation for Willow's Robot Operating System project. Choosing an exact date for the 10th anniversary of ROS is a little bit tricky, because what we know as ROS today is both older and younger than this: The concept of a robot operating system started at Stanford University, evolved through Willow Garage, and now resides with Open Robotics. It's a complicated story that has shaped much of the robotics industry in recent years, and as robotics research makes the difficult transition to companies and products, the influence of ROS is becoming even more pronounced. Over the last several weeks, IEEE Spectrum has been speaking with many of the people who helped shape ROS, from its origins as part of Stanford's Personal Robotics Program to Willow Garage and its PR2 Beta Program, and beyond. Of course, there are many other people who contributed to ROS, and we weren't able to talk to them all. This is our initial effort to put together an oral history and tell as much of the story of ROS as we can, in the words of the people who were there, making it happen. Eric Berger: Before ROS itself was a concept, Keenan Wyrobek and I were working in Ken Salisbury's lab at Stanford, running a project called the Personal Robotics Program. We had two things that we were trying to do: Build a hardware platform, and build open-source software tools with the fundamental goal of building a robotics development platform. We were grad students, the problems we saw around us were grad student problems, and we saw grad students in robotics wasting a whole lot of time. People who are good at one part of the robotics stack are usually crippled by another part--your task planning is good, but you don't know anything about vision; your hardware is decent, but you don't know anything about software.

Despite recent attempts to tease the robotics projects incubating at its Google X skunkworks, industry observers say that Google has done more to stifle than advance innovation in robotics. On December 4th, 2013, John Markoff, a technology reporter for The New York Times, broke the story that Google had acquired seven robotic companies and that Andy Rubin, of Android fame, would be heading the group. Schaft, a Japanese start-up developing a humanoid robot; Industrial Perception, a Silicon Valley start-up that developed a computer vision system for loading and unloading trucks; Meka Robotics, a robot developer for academia; Redwood Robotics, a start-up intended to compete with the Baxter robot (and others) entering the small and medium-sized shop and factory marketplace; Bot & Dolly, a maker of robotic camera systems used for special effects such as in the movie "Gravity;" Autofuss, a design and marketing firm and a partner in Bot & Dolly; and Holomni, a maker of powered caster modules for omnidirectional vehicles. On December 14th, 2013, Markoff followed up with the news that Google had added to its new stable of robotic companies by acquiring Boston Dynamics, a 20-year old developer of mobile and off-road robotics and human simulation technology mostly for DARPA and the Department of Defense. Thus some of the leading startups in the industry and the whole 80 talent pool from Boston Dynamics became part of Google. "The company's initial market will be in manufacturing, e.g., electronics assembly which is mostly done by hand.

This is a guest post by Open Source Robotics Foundation CEO Brian Gerkey. AI might be a hot topic but you'll still need to justify those projects. Eight years ago, Morgan Quigley, Eric Berger and Andrew Ng published a paper that was not about ROS. It was about STAIR, the STanford Artificial Intelligence Robot, which used a library called Switchyard to pass messages between software modules to perform complex manipulation tasks like stapler grasping. Switchyard was a purpose-built framework that was designed to be modular and robot-independent, and it was such a good idea that in 2009, "ROS: An Open-Source Robot Operating System" was presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Japan.

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. Eight years ago, Morgan Quigley, Eric Berger, and Andrew Ng published a paper that was not about ROS. It was about STAIR, the STanford Artificial Intelligence Robot, which used a library called Switchyard to pass messages between software modules to perform complex manipulation tasks like stapler grasping. Switchyard was a purpose-built framework that was designed to be modular and robot-independent, and it was such a good idea that in 2009, "ROS: An Open-Source Robot Operating System" was presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Japan.

Today, the Open Source Robotics Foundation announced a whole bunch of stuff, including a big pile of money from Toyota Research, what is probably an even bigger pile of money from Toyota Research, and the formation of the for-profit Open Source Robotics Corporation. That last thing might sound a little worrisome, since corporation-ness and open source-itude are often at odds, but we checked in with OSRF CEO Brian Gerkey, who explained how it's all going to work. The most straightforward bit of news is that the Toyota Research Institute (TRI) is making a charitable donation of US 1 million to the Open Source Robotics Foundation to "advance the development and adoption of open source robotics software." In other words, TRI thinks that OSRF has been doing pretty good work with ROS and Gazebo over the last couple years, and they're supporting that vision financially. Since it's a donation, OSRF can use that money however it wants, meaning that it's going to benefit the development of ROS and Gazebo for everyone.