It's a new year, but the industry's struggles are showing no signs of abating. Big firms are as susceptible -- if not more so. This week, Alphabet joined the growing list of tech giants making staff cuts amid ongoing economic struggles. Following a wave of layoffs from the likes of Amazon, Meta and Salesforce, Alphabet has begun letting people go. The company's "Other Bets" division is the first to see impact.

Over the course of the past year Open Robotics has taken time from our day-to-day efforts to work with our colleagues in the field to consider how the technology we develop could negatively impact society as a whole. In particular we were concerned with the weaponization of mobile robots. After a lot of thoughtful discussion, deliberation, and debate with our colleagues at organizations like Boston Dynamics, Clearpath Robotics, Agility Robotics, AnyBotics, and Unitree, we have co-authored and signed an open letter to the robotics community entitled, "General Purpose Robots Should Not Be Weaponized." You can read the letter, in its entirety, here. Additional media coverage of the letter can be found in Axios, and The Robot Report.

March 22nd, 2012 is the day it all began. That's the day we officially incorporated the Open Source Robotics Foundation, the origin of what we now call Open Robotics. The prospect of starting a company is both scary and exciting; but starting an open-source company in a niche as specialized as robotics, now that is terrifying and exhilarating, if not a little unorthodox. All we had was a dream, some open-source code, and some very smart friends, a whole lot of them. We also had the wind at our backs.

ROS Software can be used for path planning with dynamic obstacles. Almost 600 million Debs were downloaded from ROS (Robot Operating Software from Open Robotics) between July 2020 and July 2021, according ROS' 2021 Metrics Report, a 50% increase from last year. ROS is an open source development kit for robotics applications. It offers a standard, royalty-free, software platform for robotics developers. Its recent statistics report show a rapidly growing ROS community.

Clearpath Robotics, a manufacturer of mobile robotic platforms for research and development, and Open Robotics, primary maintainers of the Robot Operating System (ROS) and Gazebo simulator, today announced TurtleBot 4 - the next generation of the world's most popular open-source robotics platform. The TurtleBot 4 aims to build on the success of previous versions by providing a low-cost, fully-extensible, ROS-enabled reference platform for robotics researchers, developers and educators. The mobile base of the TurtleBot 4 is built on the iRobot Create 3 educational robot which provides an IMU, optical floor tracking sensor, and wheel encoders for accurate positioning and localization. It also includes a suite of sensors including infrared, cliff, bump, and slip detection, along with a 26Wh Li-ion battery for powering additional sensors and accessories. As well, all onboard sensor data are available as ROS topics via the network-connected ROS 2 API.

So many robots work at Changi General Hospital in Singapore that until recently it wasn't uncommon to find two delivery bots sitting in a hallway or outside an elevator in a standoff. Such impasses used to happen "several times a day," says Selina Seah, who directs the hospital's Center for Healthcare Assistive and Robotics Technologies. Unsure how to move around another object, or human passersby, the robots would simply freeze, each waiting for the other to move first. "The humans would have to actually go down and pull them apart," she says. Seah says Changi has about 50 robots, from eight manufacturers.

The ROSCon 2019 conference kicked off with a keynote from Selina Seah from Changi General Hospital and Morgan Quigley from Open Robotics. In their talk, they outlined the need for robotics and automation in hospitals. To support robotics, the Open Robotics foundation works actively to create tools to support multiple robotics platforms, fleets working together, and tools for QA and simulation. Currently, and in the future, there will be multiple challenges in healthcare: there is an aging population, a shrinking workforce due to this aging population, and a rising healthcare cost due to people expecting more of their healthcare. This makes the market for automation and assistance in elderly care potentially very large, as it is a skilled trade that requires a long training time (a nurse spends four years in school, and two years on the job, before considered skilled enough).

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.

The term "cloud robotics" was first coined in 2010 by James Kuffner, who was working at Google at the time. Google has since teased various cloud robotics efforts, but it appears the Mountain View, Calif.-based tech giant is going full-bore in 2019 with the launch of the Google Cloud Robotics Platform for developers. Details are somewhat scarce at the moment, but check out the video below and the Google Cloud Robotics Platform website for a glimpse at what the platform is all about. The Robot Report reached out to Google Cloud for more information, but has yet to hear back. We also spoke to a couple sources who are familiar with the project, but they are not at liberty to discuss the Google Cloud Robotics Platform yet. But suffice to say the timing is right thanks to the maturing of both the robotics market and Google Cloud's products.

At ROSCon 2018 in Madrid this weekend, Microsoft showed up with a small booth and a TurtleBot 3. The TurtleBot wasn't doing much, just sitting on a table, but it was sitting on the table while running ROS Melodic Morenia on Windows 10. Were it released onto the floor, it would have used its lidar to locate people and drive towards them, as a proof of concept that Microsoft has successfully gotten ROS to work in Windows. This isn't just an isolated demo, either. In a blog post, Lou Amadio (Windows IoT principal software engineer at Microsoft), says that "Microsoft is working with Open Robotics and the ROS Industrial Consortium to bring the Robot Operating System to Windows." One of the biggest obstacles to getting started with ROS is that it also involves getting started with Linux.