A decade of Open Robotics

March twenty second, 2012 is the day all of it started. That’s the day we formally included the Open Supply Robotics Basis, the origin of what we now name Open Robotics. The prospect of beginning an organization is each scary and thrilling; however beginning an open-source firm in a distinct segment as specialised as robotics, now that’s terrifying and exhilarating, if not a little bit unorthodox. All we had was a dream, some open-source code, and a few very good pals, a complete lot of them.

We additionally had the wind at our backs. Till March of 2012, Willow Storage had been the stewards of ROS and Gazebo and nurtured it from an concept to a rising group. Willow had all the time deliberate to have ROS and Gazebo ‘graduate’ to an entity outdoors of the Willow Storage; to make any actual progress in robotics required a worldwide effort, not that of a single firm. The catalyst was the DARPA Robotics Problem. When OSRF was employed to create and handle the world’s first-ever robotics simulation occasion, the corporate was up and working.

Ten years later, right here we’re, an in a single day success a decade within the making! And we couldn’t have finished it with out the assistance of the ROS and Gazebo group. On this vital day, we wished to look again on what we’ve achieved for and with that group, the robotics business, and the world typically.

A simulated Open Robotics birthday cake.

Before everything, we’ve made a whole lot of ROS and Gazebo releases! After ten years we’ve managed to launch 9 ROS 1 distros, eight ROS 2 distros (about to be 9), eleven Gazebo distros, and arising on seven Ignition distros. The curiosity in ROS has grown to the purpose the place we would have liked tooling to combine a number of robotic methods collectively, so we’ve additionally created a fifth open-source venture, Open-RMF.

Nonetheless, distro releases are solely a part of the story. Alongside the way in which the group has saved tempo and has continued to introduce an unimaginable variety of ROS packages to reinforce the core capabilities of ROS. simply public Github repositories, there are 5852 repositories tagged for ROS and 707 ROS 2 repositories. To not be outdone, the tutorial group has cited the unique ROS paper, “ROS: an open-source Robotic Working System,” 9451 occasions in line with Google Scholar. Our annual builders assembly, ROSCon, is now getting into its tenth yr, and we’re pleased to report that we’ve had over 8000 attendees, and beneficiant sponsorship from over 150 totally different organizations.

Trying again over time, some of the widespread themes in our work is pleasant competitors. We’ve labored with purchasers all around the globe to create real looking simulations of virtually each robotics area; from factories in NIST ARIAC, to maritime environments in VRX, to catastrophe websites within the DARPA Robotics Problem, we’ve seen all of it! We lately concluded the DARPA SubT competitors, which marks our ninth high-profile competitors efficiently executed, with two extra within the works now. We consider that these pleasant competitions between robotic builders have been one of many driving forces behind our success.

As we’ve grown, we’ve additionally seen ROS and Gazebo communities develop together with us. Final yr, the ROS Wiki had roughly 2.5 million guests, and no less than one customer from each single nation on the globe! In 2011, the primary yr of our document preserving, we solely served 290,102 ROS binary packages, and in ten years that quantity has soared to 35,036,199 in 2021! Equally, in 2011 we had solely 4517 distinctive guests downloading ROS packages, and right this moment that quantity has grown to 789,956 distinctive guests. That’s 175 occasions extra customers in only a decade! What was as soon as only a handful of researchers and college students is now a world-wide group of execs, hobbyists, and lecturers.

In our ten years, Open Robotics itself has additionally grown and altered. After we began in 2012 we had been only a handful of individuals working in a small workplace, right this moment we’re a group of fifty folks unfold out throughout the globe, with employees within the US, Singapore, Spain, Germany, and Japan. We’ve mentored dozens of interns, each in-house and thru the Google Summer season of Code and Outreachy packages, who’ve gone on to have profitable careers and a few of whom have even based their very own firms.

A birthday card from considered one of our youngest ROS customers.

It has been a wild ten years and actually humbling to see an untold variety of builders and customers assist and construct upon our work. We don’t know what the following ten years will appear like; we could attain the moon, or the underside of the ocean, however we gained’t be capable to get there with out the assist of our open-source group. We look ahead to the following decade!.