Standardized Robotic Operating System

[raptor]

Interesting article stating that robotics is in about the same place personal computing was ~30 years ago.  The hope is to be able to someday download say code to operate wheels, or an arm as generic software.  Given there is so much radically different hardware, would we end up in a world where you need to also download drivers for your particular equip like you do pc components?

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/08/11/1242217/A-Standardized-OS-For-Robots?from=rss

Scott

[William Grim]

Well, I think it's already clear that they've chosen an operating system: Linux.  The operating system, however, is not the problem; Linux already does the one thing they claim to need: hardware abstraction.  This has been a problem solved for decades now.

The main problem is that Linux itself is branched into so many needless distributions, which means there's the major problem of binaries being incompatible due to differences in library versions, code compilation differences, and linkage issues.  To resolve this, they'd all have to settle on just one distribution, which is probably going to happen about the time Linux takes over the desktop.

The other problem is that robotics hardware is very specialized.  No one wants to run an OS on an 8-bit CPU, and they want a customized operating system running on a 16-bit CPU.  On 32-bit and higher CPUs, we get back to the issue discussed earlier.

Robots are built for special purposes.  There is probably some appeal to general purpose robots that can be extended, but when you're talking about power efficiency and being good at specific jobs, it suddenly becomes less important.  However, I am sure physical hardware will advance to the point that makes it feasible, but really, the software problems they're talking about have all been solved.  They just need to work on a standards organization to get things squared away.

P.S. Chicks think you're hotter if you've developed your own motor controls and movement algorithms ;-)

[Justin Camerer]

P.S. Chicks think you're hotter if you've developed your own motor controls and movement algorithms ;-)

i don't think that is actually true...

[raptor]

Dr. White once asked me why I want to work in robotics and not take Graphics.
My only response:
"Because chicks dig it"

Scott