All posts by Open Robotics

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.

The letter codifies internal policies we’ve had at Open Robotics since our inception and we think it captures the sentiments of much of the ROS community. For our part, we have pledged that we will not weaponize mobile robots, and we do not support others doing so either. We believe that the weaponization of robots raises serious ethical issues and harms public trust in technologies that can have tremendous benefits to society. This is but a first step, and we look forward to working with policy makers, the robotics community, and the general public, to continue to promote the ethical use of robots and prohibit their misuse. This is but one of many discussions that must happen between robotics professionals, the general public, and lawmakers about advanced technologies, and quite frankly, we think it is long overdue.

Due to the permissive nature of the licenses we use for ROS, Gazebo, and our other projects, it is difficult, if not impossible, for us to limit the use of the technology we develop to build weaponized systems. However, we do not condone such efforts, and we will have no part in directly assisting those who do with our technical expertise or labor. This has been our policy from the start, and will continue to be our policy. We encourage the ROS community to take a similar stand and to work with their local lawmakers to prevent the weaponization of robotic systems. Moreover, we hope the entire ROS community will take time to reflect deeply on the ethical implications of their work, and help others better understand both the positive and negative outcomes that are possible in robotics.

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. Until March of 2012, Willow Garage had been the stewards of ROS and Gazebo and nurtured it from an idea to a growing community. Willow had always planned to have ROS and Gazebo ‘graduate’ to an entity outside of the Willow Garage; to make any real progress in robotics required a worldwide effort, not that of a single company. The catalyst was the DARPA Robotics Challenge. When OSRF was hired to create and manage the world’s first-ever robotics simulation event, the company was up and running.

Ten years later, here we are, an overnight success a decade in the making! And we couldn’t have done it without the help of the ROS and Gazebo community. On this important day, we wanted to look back on what we’ve accomplished for and with that community, the robotics industry, and the world in general.

A simulated Open Robotics birthday cake.

First and foremost, we’ve made a lot of ROS and Gazebo releases! After ten years we’ve managed to release nine ROS 1 distros, eight ROS 2 distros (about to be nine), eleven Gazebo distros, and coming up on seven Ignition distros. The interest in ROS has grown to the point where we needed tooling to integrate multiple robotic systems together, so we’ve also created a fifth open-source project, Open-RMF.

However, distro releases are only part of the story. Along the way the community has kept pace and has continued to introduce an incredible number of ROS packages to augment the core capabilities of ROS. Looking at just public Github repositories, there are 5852 repositories tagged for ROS and 707 ROS 2 repositories. Not to be outdone, the academic community has cited the original ROS paper, “ROS: an open-source Robot Operating System,” 9451 times according to Google Scholar. Our annual developers meeting, ROSCon, is now entering its tenth year, and we’re happy to report that we’ve had over 8000 attendees, and generous sponsorship from over 150 different organizations.

Looking back over the years, one of the most common themes in our work is friendly competition. We’ve worked with clients all over the globe to create realistic simulations of almost every robotics domain; from factories in NIST ARIAC, to maritime environments in VRX, to disaster sites in the DARPA Robotics Challenge, we’ve seen it all! We recently concluded the DARPA SubT competition, which marks our ninth high-profile competition successfully executed, with two more in the works now. We believe that these friendly competitions between robot developers have been one of the driving forces behind our success.

As we’ve grown, we’ve also seen ROS and Gazebo communities grow along with us. Last year, the ROS Wiki had approximately 2.5 million visitors, and at least one visitor from every single country on the globe! In 2011, the first year of our record keeping, we only served 290,102 ROS binary packages, and in ten years that number has soared to 35,036,199 in 2021! Similarly, in 2011 we had only 4517 unique visitors downloading ROS packages, and today that number has grown to 789,956 unique visitors. That’s 175 times more users in just a decade! What was once just a handful of researchers and students is now a world-wide community of professionals, hobbyists, and academics.

In our ten years, Open Robotics itself has also grown and changed. When we started in 2012 we were just a handful of people working in a small office, today we’re a team of 50 people spread out across the globe, with staff in the US, Singapore, Spain, Germany, and Japan. We’ve mentored dozens of interns, both in-house and through the Google Summer of Code and Outreachy programs, who have gone on to have successful careers and some of whom have even founded their own companies.

A birthday card from one of our youngest ROS users.

It has been a wild ten years and truly humbling to see an untold number of developers and users support and build upon our work. We don’t know what the next ten years will look like; we may reach the moon, or the bottom of the ocean, but we won’t be able to get there without the support of our open-source community. We look forward to the next decade!.

Imagine for a moment that a road is used only for a single car and driver. Everything is smooth and wonderful. Then you wake up from that utopian dream and remember that our road networks have multiple cars of varying sizes, from different manufacturers, each with a driver with unique behaviors behind the wheel. We quickly realize that traffic conventions and rules are in place to avoid complete and utter chaos. We believe with increasing robotic use cases in the public domain as we all do see, a similar parallel reality needs to be realized and we propose that RoMi-H, an open-source robot and infrastructure framework that simplifies cross fleet robot collaboration, is the way to achieve this coming reality!

Even before the onset of COVID-19, the number of robots and automation technologies introduced and tested in the healthcare industry has been skyrocketing. Service robots perform an ever increasing and diverse set of tasks; taking on smaller and more sensitive deliveries in some cases and relying more heavily on shared infrastructure such as elevators (lifts), doors, and passageways. No single robotics or automation provider can supply the breadth of solutions required in a modern healthcare facility and no facility can afford to operate siloed systems requiring dedicated infrastructure and operating unique user interfaces. Therein lies the challenge.

First announced in July 2018, Robotic Middleware for Healthcare (RoMi-H) is a unique open-source system built on ROS 2 and simulated using the Gazebo simulator. It allows for uniform communication and monitoring across robot platforms, sensors, and enterprise information systems. A brief explanation of this initiative can be found in WIRED Magazine: As Robots Fill the Workplace, They Must Learn to Get Along. In tomorrow’s reality, interoperability must be front and center for every developer, manufacturer, systems integrator, and end-user.

As we have written before:

We need food-delivery robots from one vendor to communicate with drug-delivery robots from another vendor. We need a unified approach to command and control for all the robots in a facility. We need a reliable way to develop and test multi-vendor systems in software simulation prior to deployment. And for it to succeed we need this critical interoperability infrastructure to be open source.

Under the leadership of Singapore’s Centre for Healthcare Assistive and Robotics Technology (CHART) and with collaborators such as IHiS, Hope Technik, GovTech and other solution providers, Open Robotics has been working since 2018 to develop an open-source software solution. Its goal is to realize the potential of a vendor agnostic and interoperable communication system for heterogeneous robots, sensors, and information systems in the healthcare space. To accelerate its development we are encouraging contributions to the open-source codebase to accelerate the development of a robust and sustainable system.

In order to understand the underlying mechanics of RoMi-H, we encourage you to take a look at Programming Multiple Robots with ROS 2. It is being continuously updated and will provide you with a thorough explanation of ROS 2 — upon which RoMi-H is built — and the core Robotics Middleware Framework (RMF) that serves to power RoMi-H. The book also features a tutorial on how one might build a web application that can interface with RoMi-H to create useful applications for robot operators or user-facing tools for the robotics industry.

RoMi-H is able to apply the same software across the different robotic systems while ROS 2 manages the communication and data routing from machine to machine; allowing for real-time, dependable and high-performance data exchanges via a publish-subscribe pattern. Publishers group their messages into different classes and subscribers receive information from the classes of messages they have indicated an interest in. This allows RMF to provide a common platform for integrating heterogeneous robotic systems.

We see the RoMi-H project as a significant step, encouraging an open and integrated approach to robotics development and digitising healthcare. We are looking forward to receiving feedback and contributions from interested parties.

Learn More

A public webinar that introduced RMF and featured a live demonstration took place on 18 August 2020 in the CHART Lab. The presentations and recordings can be viewed here. At the same time, if you are interested in finding out more and viewing the source code, do check out the ROS 2 book and the following repositories:

ROS 2 Book:

• https://osrf.github.io/ros2multirobotbook

Github Repositories:

• RMF: https://github.com/osrf/rmf_core
• Traffic Editor: https://github.com/osrf/traffic_editor
• Free Fleet Management: https://github.com/osrf/free_fleet
• Demo Worlds: https://github.com/osrf/rmf_demos

We would like to acknowledge the Singapore government for their vision and support to start this ambitious research and development project, “Development of Standardised Robotics Middleware Framework – RMF detailed design and common services, large-scale virtual test farm infrastructure, and simulation modelling”. The project is supported by the Ministry of Health (MOH) and the National Robotics Program (NRP).

Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the views of the NR2PO, MOH or other parties.