kscottz

[There is, and by some estimates 1.3M people use it.](https://docs.ros.org/en/rolling/)

I don't think that is the intent of the article at all. I think the article is making a comment on building a single framework that can enable anyone to solve an arbitrary robotics problem. From the second paragraph, "The idea goes something like this: Programming robots is hard. And there are some people with really arcane skills and PhDs who are really expensive and seem to be required for some reason. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could do robotics without them?"

There are host of companies, both extant and deceased, who attempted to do just that.

I don't think any ROS developer has ever made the claim that ROS makes building a robot "easy", "easier" yes, but "easy", certainly not. ROS is simply a collection of tools that people have built over the years to get their work done faster by not re-inventing the wheel. Many ROS packages have decades of real-world deployment behind them. Some ROS packages, like Nav2 and MoveIt, are incredibly helpful, other packages are difficult to use and poorly documented, just like in any open source ecosystem.

> Which in their quest to make robotics simple; made json a programming language

JSON, in ROS? I don't think that's how it works.

> massive ecosystem of abstracted complexity that breaks in undebuggable ways

If you have a solution for this I think you solved the problem of software engineering in general.

Since when does open source mean cheap?

Labor isn't free. Building custom PCBs and hardware in low quantity isn't cheap. Building, calibrating, and testing robots isn't cheap.

SEEKING VOLUNTEERS: Robot Operating System (ROS) and Gazebo Simulator

ROS is the open source software powering robots all over the globe. The project needs volunteers in every capacity, from core robotics software to visualization, data logging, and developer resources. Gazebo is our sibling library used to simulate robots prior to deploying code. Many of our repositories have "Good First Issue" tags for new contributors.

Source code and community resources for ROS, like Discord and Discourse, are all listed here:

https://github.com/ros2

Source code and resources for Gazebo are available here:

https://github.com/gazebosim

To get a sense of what people are doing with ROS check out the videos from our yearly developer conference ROSCon.

https://roscon.ros.org/2023/

If you are looking for some help getting started swing by our Discord server:

https://discord.com/servers/open-robotics-107782554369892765...