"Nevertheless, roboticists are starting to make some
headway.The Robot Operating System or ROS is an open-source set of
programs meant to serve as a common platform for a wide range of
robotics research. It is being developed and used by teams at
Stanford University in California, the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and the Technical University of Munich, Germany, among
others.
"ROS has software commands that, for instance, provide ways of
controlling a robot's navigation, and its arms, grippers and
sensors, without needing details of how the hardware functions. The
system also includes high-level commands for actions like image
recognition and even opening doors. When ROS boots up on a robot's
computer, it asks for a description of the robot that includes
things like the length of its arm segments and how the joints
rotate. It then makes this information available to the
higher-level algorithms.
"A standard OS would also help researchers focus on a key aspect
that so far has been lacking in robotics: reproducibility."
