Open-Source Software Is Starting to Help Robots Think
After open-source robotics hardware saved roboticists years of setup work, the harder task of getting robots to think is now also being open sourced. Companies including Hugging Face, Nvidia, and Alibaba have made significant bets on open-source robotics in the last two years, releasing tools and models aimed at reasoning, deciding, and acting. The article traces this shift from the early ROS framework to today's open AI stacks for robotics.
Key Takeaways
- When a group of academics started making open-source robotics hardware , a generation of roboticists got years of their lives back.
Now, the bigger challenge is getting robots to think-and that's starting to be open sourced too.
- The Robot Operating System, ROS, changed that when it made its debut in 2007.
By bundling tools and attracting more users, it became the de facto standard.
- Brian Gerkey , who helped build ROS in the mid-2000s, says he was drawn to the project because of how much open source had already changed the world, pointing out that nearly the entire internet is built on it .
"I'm a tool builder, and I like to share everything as openly as I possibly can, because I think that's where we get the most impact out of what we build," says Gerkey, board chair of Open Robotics and now CTO at Intrinsic , a robotics and AI unit of Google.
- "To get into robotics, you no longer need a Ph.D.," he says.
The result is a much larger pool of people who can contribute, and the field is starting to look less like a specialized discipline and more like a platform that anyone can build on.
- "We should be able to provide a high-quality, state-of-the-art pre-trained model that anyone can go and take and fine tune for their own purposes."
When a group of academics started making open-source robotics hardware , a generation of roboticists got years of their lives back. Now, the bigger challenge is getting robots to think-and that's starting to be open sourced too. The shift is still early, but companies including Hugging Face, Nvidia, and Alibaba have all made significant bets on open-source robotics in the last two years, releasing tools and models aimed at the higher-level work of getting robots to reason, decide, and act.
The open source movement that accelerated other AI applications is now being applied to the problem of making robots smarter. If these attempts to bring AI to robotics with open-source platforms succeed, the barrier to building a capable robot could fall as fast as the barrier to building an AI application did. The world ROS built Open-source robotics software has been around since the mid-1990s, with early projects like Carnegie Mellon University's Inter-Process Communication package and the Player Project in the early 2000s laying the groundwork.
But these were often tied to specific research groups, and the field remained fragmented. The Robot Operating System, ROS, changed that when it made its debut in 2007. By bundling tools and attracting more users, it became the de facto standard.
For more details please read the original article at IEEE Spectrum AI.
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