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.

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.

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.

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.

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. Through these years ROS has grown into a strong world-wide community. Academic use of ROS continues to grow. Citations of the first ROS paper, "ROS: An Open-Source Robot Operating System," has grown to 2,871.