Re:Robot Operating System – A flexible framework for writing...
by jvanderbot on Thursday September 06, 2018 @12:39PM
(#17927504)
I love the basics of ROS, but good lord they crammed far too much "into it" for it to only sit on one (or a few closely related) operating systems. If you build an ecosystem on top of an operating system, at least make it OS independent. (python+pip anyone?)
Having said that, it did great things to bring together the community and kill the fragmented landscape of robotics. (Does anyone remember the 2000s-2010s and all the custom, proprietary robot abstraction layers that were built up? Awful.). Clearpath and a number of small vendors partnered well with ROS, pushing the BS off the stage.
But it hasn't aged well ...
The messaging and logging is the only useful component (for me / my teams). The codebases / nodes are abysmally intertwined, over cohesive, and lack a nice unixy modular architecture that I'd expect with something built on top of a message passing layer. The central point of failure is often a very real point of failure in spotty networking environments (dropping from wifi can kill your whole stack, even if all messages are local machine only)
DDS is nice, but everyone serious is pretty much already using it (mil / aero), esp because of shared memory transport. So it's great that they were dragged forward ... but it doesn't quite feel like the big leap that ROS 1.0 was.
Having said that, it did great things to bring together the community and kill the fragmented landscape of robotics. (Does anyone remember the 2000s-2010s and all the custom, proprietary robot abstraction layers that were built up? Awful.). Clearpath and a number of small vendors partnered well with ROS, pushing the BS off the stage.
But it hasn't aged well ...
The messaging and logging is the only useful component (for me / my teams). The codebases / nodes are abysmally intertwined, over cohesive, and lack a nice unixy modular architecture that I'd expect with something built on top of a message passing layer. The central point of failure is often a very real point of failure in spotty networking environments (dropping from wifi can kill your whole stack, even if all messages are local machine only)
DDS is nice, but everyone serious is pretty much already using it (mil / aero), esp because of shared memory transport. So it's great that they were dragged forward ... but it doesn't quite feel like the big leap that ROS 1.0 was.