Google takes a stab at cloud based robotics with ROS

twilyth · Jan 3, 2012 at 10:34 PM

There's much more to this story including how it could threaten jobs in the not so distant future.

At the 2011 Google I/O developer's conference, Google announced a new initiative called "cloud robotics" in conjunction with robot manufacturer Willow Garage. Google has developed an open source (free) operating system for robots, with the unsurprising name "ROS" -- or Robot Operating System. In other words, Google is trying to create the MS-DOS (or MS Windows) of robotics.

With ROS, software developers will be able to write code in the Java programming language and control robots in a standardized way -- much in the same way that programmers writing applications for Windows or the Mac can access and control computer hardware.

Google's approach also offers compatibility with Android. Robots will be able to take advantage of the "cloud-based" (in other words, online) features used in Android phones, as well as new cloud-based capabilities specifically for robots. In essence this means that much of the intelligence that powers the robots of the future may reside on huge server farms, rather than in the robot itself. While that may sound a little "Skynet-esque," it's a strategy that could offer huge benefits for building advanced robots.
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Jizzler · Jan 3, 2012 at 11:43 PM

Martin Ford takes a bit of a bleak tone for such a positive milestone in history!* Bring on the lovebots!

(*To be fair to Microsoft, they released a robotics SDK several years ago to try standardizing robotic programming too.)

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