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Re:$100 robot kit running ROS2 and Navigation2 by stefan_ on Friday December 11, 2020 @04:26PM (#25391227)
ROS itself is basically a glorified message bus, and the ecosystem around it allows you to quickly cobble together a robot from disparate parts (use one thing to publish frames from your specific camera model, feed it into some other module that does SLAM).

Very popular in research, so in practice little of it really works together, much is abandoned and most stuff barely compiles. Lately there have been "smart" people thinking they can just install ROS and presto robot AI startup. These people are in for a harsh lesson.

Re:$100 robot kit running ROS2 and Navigation2 by a_t48 on Friday December 11, 2020 @05:02PM (#25391848)
> Lately there have been "smart" people thinking they can just install ROS and presto robot AI startup. These people are in for a harsh lesson.

Oh, but they can. The "presto AI" part is easy. Making a working product after ROS collapses under its own weight is the tough bit.

Re:$100 robot kit running ROS2 and Navigation2 by ska on Friday December 11, 2020 @06:18PM (#25392981)
> Making a working product ...

This is always majority of the work.

Often you get research lab products that are pretty cool (this is not robotic specific) and people think "Hey, we should spin this off/sell this/licence this, it would be a great product and 90% of the work is done".

Usually, at most 5-10% of the work has actually been done. 20% if it is an uncharacteristically completest lab. There are a significant number of "startups" dying on the vine because of this fundamental error.

Another problem with above of course, there is no such thing as "presto AI".