Open Source in Mobile Robotics

Transcription

1 Presentation for the course Il software libero Politecnico di Torino - IIT@Polito June 13, 2011

2 Introduction Mobile Robotics Applications Where are the problems? What about the solutions? Mobile robotics is the largest (and newest) field in robotics Two main areas, many different applications

3 Mobile Robotics Applications Mobile Robotics Applications Where are the problems? What about the solutions? Service robotics Home environment Vacuum cleaners Elderly people assistant Toys and entertainment Health care and medical Robotic Surgeon Impaired people support Security and exploration Military Scientific/industrial explorations Urban Search and Rescue

4 Introduction Mobile Robotics Applications Where are the problems? What about the solutions? Many applications for industry and research... Stefano Rosa ( stefano.rosa@polito.it)

5 Few available to the public! Mobile Robotics Applications Where are the problems? What about the solutions? Completely autonomous robots are still far away!

6 Where are the problems? Mobile Robotics Applications Where are the problems? What about the solutions? High costs dificulty of adoption by schools and hobbyists Robotics industries sell proprietary hardware and software forcing their own standards Research is fragmented into many small projects everyone uses his own standards everyone re-invents the wheel Vicious circle: 1 High costs Demand from the public is low 2 Low demand High costs

7 What about the solutions? Mobile Robotics Applications Where are the problems? What about the solutions? Solutions: Open hardware and software easy to modify, extend, integrate more suited to adoption in education (schools) Go towards big open source projects (ROS, OpenCV,...) code reuse, big communities Necessity of common standards create open standards and try to comply with them Virtuous circle: 1 High diffusion Lower costs 2 Lower costs Higher diffusion

8 Open Hardware Robots e-puck icub PR-2 Lego Mindstorms NXT e-puck (EPFL) icub (RobotCub Consortium) PR2 (Willow Garage) Lego Mindstorms NXT

9 e-puck Introduction e-puck icub PR-2 Lego Mindstorms NXT Designed at EPFL (Lausanne, Switzerland). The e-puck is completely open hardware and its onboard software is open source. It is built and sold by some startup companies. Since the e-puck is open hardware, its price is lower than competitors. This leaded also to a rapid adoption by the scientific community despite the original educational orientation of the robot.

10 icub Introduction e-puck icub PR-2 Lego Mindstorms NXT icub is a humanoid robot testbed for research into human cognition and artificial intelligence. developed by the RobotCub Consortium the platform is openly distributed software developed by the Consortium is open-source the Consortium is open to new partners and forms of collaboration worldwide

11 PR-2 Introduction e-puck icub PR-2 Lego Mindstorms NXT PR2 is a two-armed wheeled robot aimed at domestic applications. Developed by Willow Garage. Intended for academic and industrial robotics research. Willow Garage is also maintaining ROS (Robot Operating System), OpenCV vision library, and currently PCL (Point Cloud Library). These projects all use the BSD license.

12 Lego Mindstorms NXT e-puck icub PR-2 Lego Mindstorms NXT Complete set of sensors and actuators and a programmable controller The NXT controller is open source since 2006 More and more used as an educational tool both in schools and universities Third party programming libraries are available

13 Introduction Open Source Frameworks for Robotics Other Projects Standardization in Mobile Robot Programming Robot simulation frameworks are a valuable tool for education, research and design purposes Robotics is a multi-disciplinary field, so different software libraries are needed for: computer vision computation human-machine interfaces (GUI) Why should we use open source software for robotics? customizable and extendible code reuse is a big value big and active community it s free!

14 Open Source Frameworks for Robotics Open Source Frameworks for Robotics Other Projects Standardization in Mobile Robot Programming ROS (Robot Operating System) provides libraries and tools to help software developers create robot applications. It provides hardware abstraction, device drivers, libraries, visualizers, message-passing, package management, and more. Player Project is one of the most popular open-source robot interfaces in research and post-secondary education Carmen Carnegie Mellon Robot Navigation Toolkit

15 Other Projects Introduction Open Source Frameworks for Robotics Other Projects Standardization in Mobile Robot Programming OpenCV (opencv.willowgarage.com) Blender For Robotics! ( Pyro Python Robotics (

16 Open Source Frameworks for Robotics Other Projects Standardization in Mobile Robot Programming Standardization in Mobile Robot Programming Many efforts are being made in order to define the following standards: common practises for robot programming common onthology for robotics evaluation benchmarks Some references: (Montemerlo, M. and Roy, N. and Thrun, S., Perspectives on Standardization in Mobile Robot Programming: The Carnegie Mellon Navigation (CARMEN) Toolkit, 2003) (

17 Introduction Open hardware and software are a valuable tool in robotics to enhance collaboration at any level from hardware design to algorithms and code reuse Efforts are being made towards open source robots, but: almost only in academia! cooperation between research and industry is still mono-directional for the largest part