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NASA Frees Their Robotics Software

Posted by samzenpus on Wed Jun 20, 2007 06:19 PM
from the now-everyone-will-make-robots dept.
Robotics Science
kremvax writes "It's a field day for robotics hackers everywhere, as NASA releases the first installment of their CLARAty reusable robotic software framework to the public. According to the JPL press release, these modules contain everything from math infrastructure to device drivers for common motors and cameras, and computer vision, image, and 3D processing."
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  • Neat.... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 20 2007, @06:40PM (#19588387)
    Urge to tinker....rising....
  • It is free, runs on linux and mac, supports a wide variety of hardware, has libraries for 3d image recognition, was tested in autonomous robots on mars...
    I work developing a similar system. I hope my boss does not come across slashdot, because my job would be seriously endangered.

    (or perhaps i should only have a peek or two in the code)

  • Speaking of NASA and Robots.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Tmack (593755) on Wednesday June 20 2007, @06:53PM (#19588543) Homepage Journal
    The Model B-9 from the Lost in Space TV series became NASA's [nasa.gov] this week... wonder if they are porting this software to it as well?

    tm

    • Isn't that model originally from Forbidden Planet?

      If so, then... well, even NASA needs a good Malt Whiskey fabber ;)

  • CLARAty Open Source License- not really (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 20 2007, @06:53PM (#19588549)

    © 2006 California Institute of Technology ("Caltech").
    This software, including source and object code, and any accompanying documentation ("Software") is owned by Caltech. Caltech has designated this Software as Technology and Software Publicly Available ("TSPA"), which means that this Software is publicly available under U.S. Export Laws. With the TSPA designation, a user may use and distribute the Software on a royalty-free basis with the understanding that:

    1. The Software shall not be used for commercial production or sale of any commercial product or derivative incorporating the Software. Should the user desire to use the Software for any such commercial purpose, the user must contact the Office of Technology Transfer at Caltech to obtain permissions and pay the appropriate royalty; and

    2. THIS SOFTWARE AND ANY RELATED MATERIALS WERE CREATED BY THE CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY (CALTECH) UNDER A U.S. GOVERNMENT CONTRACT WITH THE NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION (NASA). THE SOFTWARE IS TECHNOLOGY AND SOFTWARE PUBLICLY AVAILABLE UNDER U.S. EXPORT LAWS AND IS PROVIDED "AS-IS" TO THE RECIPIENT WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, INCLUDING ANY WARRANTIES OF PERFORMANCE OR MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR USE OR PURPOSE (AS SET FORTH IN UNITED STATES UCC 2312-2313) OR FOR ANY PURPOSE WHATSOEVER, FOR THE SOFTWARE AND RELATED MATERIALS, HOWEVER USED.

    IN NO EVENT SHALL CALTECH, ITS JET PROPULSION LABORATORY, OR NASA BE LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES AND/OR COSTS, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OF ANY KIND, INCLUDING ECONOMIC DAMAGE OR INJURY TO PROPERTY AND LOST PROFITS, REGARDLESS OF WHETHER CALTECH, JPL, OR NASA BE ADVISED, HAVE REASON TO KNOW, OR, IN FACT, SHALL KNOW OF THE POSSIBILITY.

    RECIPIENT BEARS ALL RISK RELATING TO QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE SOFTWARE AND ANY RELATED MATERIALS, AND AGREES TO INDEMNIFY CALTECH AND NASA FOR ALL THIRD-PARTY CLAIMS RESULTING FROM THE ACTIONS OF RECIPIENT IN THE USE OF THE SOFTWARE; and

    3. Caltech is under no obligation to provide technical support for the Software; and

    4. All copies of the Software released by user must be marked with this marking language, inclusive of the copyright statement, TSPA designation and user understandings.
    IANAL, but I don't think this license meets the definition of either free software [fsf.org] or open source [opensource.org]. The 1st distribution and usage condition says that a user cannot use the software to make a commercial product, and cannot sell it commercially. This violates FSF freedom 0 (and OSI freedom 6), and the FSF's site even specifically states:

    ``Free software'' does not mean ``non-commercial''. A free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution. Commercial development of free software is no longer unusual; such free commercial software is very important.

    As a result, this software isn't "free as in freedom".
      • Why do you sound so suprised that you got fucked out of your tax dollars?

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Rakishi (759894)
        NASA contracted them to make software that does X. They let CalTech retain ownership of said software. As a result they were able to pay less for the software than if they had gotten full ownership of it.

        Since they also got the source code this is a perfectly logical way of doing things. Getting ownership would have cost taxpayers a lot more money without giving any benefit to NASA or the taxpayers likely.

        • Since they also got the source code this is a perfectly logical way of doing things. Getting ownership would have cost taxpayers a lot more money without giving any benefit to NASA or the taxpayers likely.

          Not sure how you come to this conclusion. Surely NASA would profit when the software is used and worked on by other companies and individuals. That would likely lead to more features, better quality and less bugs. Furthermore this software could be used as a half-fabricate in many which will lead to new products being developed and marketed and existing products becoming better and/or cheaper. All very good for basically everybody except direct competitors.

          This kind of middleware software is perfect for op

  • I just could not help but think if the Wikipedia folks could now be able to start up a "WikiBot" were Mechanical, Electrical, and Software Embedded/Robotic Engineering could be documented.

  • Free information = Terrorists with robots (Score:4, Funny)

    by tacarat (696339) on Wednesday June 20 2007, @07:20PM (#19588789) Journal
    Seriously. Jonny5 will be sending his manifesto to the New York Times pretty soon.

  • this library may not be 'free' (Score:5, Informative)

    by qw0ntum (831414) on Wednesday June 20 2007, @08:07PM (#19589177) Journal
    But there does exist another large robotics library that is completely free called Player [sourceforge.net]. The project even has two complete simulators, Stage (for 2D simulation of many robots) and Gazebo (for 3D simulation of a smaller number of robots). Great project for any aspiring roboticists out there.
    • From my tiny amount of research into the Player project there is only limited support for certain real world hardware.
      It seems to be the right thing to use if you have a mobile robot. or some kind of football-playing-robot, but for serious robotics it doesn't seem to have the full package.
      OROCOS as a (static) robotics platform. It is mightily powerful, and has a sane license. The downside is that the docs are non existant, and has a steep learning curve.
      Am I wrong? Does anyone know if player has some d
      • I don't believe I've actually seen anything for arms before... Then again, I've never explicitly gone looking. But I have a feeling there's probably not much since, as you said, it's more geared toward mobile robots. Here's a list of supported devices: clicky [sourceforge.net].
    • If it's simulation you want, then you should also check out the Microsoft Robotics Studio.

      http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/robotics/default. aspx [microsoft.com]

      http://beta.channel9.msdn.com/Media/Microsoft-Robo tics-Tour-CCR-VPL-Simulation-Part-1/ [msdn.com]

      It pains me to praise Microsoft, but from the Channel 9 video it looks pretty impresive - especially the simulation capabilities.

  • Does this include (Score:3, Funny)

    by sien (35268) on Wednesday June 20 2007, @08:11PM (#19589215) Homepage
    The metric to Imperial conversions routines [cnn.com]?

  • Article attribution - MrFuture.com (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kremvax (307366) on Wednesday June 20 2007, @08:56PM (#19589551) Homepage
    Hmm, interesting. Slashdot seems to have clipped my article attribution out. This was originally blogged at http://mrfuture.com/ [mrfuture.com] And my quote was lifted directly from there.

    Anyone know of a way to fix that after the fact, or does Slashdot dislike via mentions?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by kremvax (307366)
      Or it might just have been my oversight that clipped it out, but I could swear the story link itself was set to MrFuture.com. Either way I feel terrible.

      Everyone send a nice note to MrFuture.com thanking him for originally digging this up.

      Kremvax
    • I sent an edit request to Slashdot, explaining the above, but with no response, and sadly no credit ( for the title, the text, and the story itself ) will go to http://mrfuture.com/ [mrfuture.com]

      That sucks. I'm changing my url to theirs, for what little it will do, but I'm thinking that this might be the last time I submit a story to Slashdot. The "(via...)" convention in blogs has really become the right thing to do, at the bare minimum in situations like this.

      If Slashdot systematically omits credit for a story's so

  • Ooh camera algorithms (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Me: "My friends and I wanted to make a Moon landing video, what effects do we need to fake it?"
    NASA: "Here, have ours. Even comes with a moon rock generator."
    Me: "Sweet! I can make a 200 pound rock fall on one of the astronauts?"
    NASA: "Yeah, but sometimes it makes a 200 kilogram rock instead. We still haven't ironed that stuff out."
  • Anything that comes from a government lab should be in the public domain unless it was developed for military purposes. If our tax dollars were spent to build it, it is ours. Patent protection costs so much that the expenditures often counterbalance the licensing revenue.

  • My master thesis finished this month is about component systems for mobile robotics and other domains, it's a called Experimental Robotics Framework (ERF), and is freely available at http://miarn.sf.net/ [sf.net]. ERF makes it easy to setup experiments in robotics domains and even other domains by legoing (putting together) simple components to achieve lots of different experiments. It uses robotics sensors (+30) from Player/Stage/Gazebo and displays the experiments in 3d using opengl + fltk. Also it makes it trivia

  • NASA uses tcsh [nasa.gov]. Eat that, you bash loosahs...

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      No seriously, NASA is an acronym not a proper name. National Aviation and Space Administration.
      Kindly get it right. Oh yeah, this is slashdot...

      The BBC does it as well, which is odd since they should use "Bbc" to be consistent.

      But I'm from the Usa, so what do I know...
      • ...and it's the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, not Aviation.
        • Actually FORTRAN is supposed to be capitalized through FORTRAN 77 -- starting at Fortran 90 it was officially changed to title case with deliberate intent. It is not now nor has it ever been properly called "fortran". There have been many empassioned discussions on the topic of FORTRAN capitalization; the ANSI standards reflect what I described above, and I'm not aware of anyone arguing that "fortran" is accurate, only that "Fortran" should be "FORTRAN", even after FORTRAN 77. (Note: My spell checker actual

    • No seriously, NASA is an acronym not a proper name. National Aviation and Space Administration. Kindly get it right.


      That's strange. NASA [nasa.gov] itself seems to think it is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

    • Re:lol editors lol style guide lol snape dies (Score:5, Insightful)

      by vux984 (928602) on Wednesday June 20 2007, @07:44PM (#19589001)
      No seriously, NASA is an acronym not a proper name. National Aviation and Space Administration.
      Kindly get it right. Oh yeah, this is slashdot...

      Nobody enunciates 'en ay ess ay' its just 'nasa'. Its may be an acronym, but its become a word in its own right too, like radar, sonar, laser, scuba, snafu, dos, bios, ram, flak, gestapo, etc...

      Or perhaps if you want an examples of 'proper names'? How about:

      Fiat - Fabbrica Italianna Automobili Torino
      Gulag - Glavnoye Upravleniye Ispravitelno-trudovykh LAGerey
      Gestapo - GEheime STAatsPolizei

      Its really only a matter of time before some of the others become 'words' ... AIDS, SARS, NASDAQ, SETI, NAFTA and NATO spring to mind as likely candidates, I've seen them written out as Aids, Sars, Nasdaq, Seti, Nafta, and Nato, respectively.
    • I have heard NASA wants to free space.

    • Never free Robots or there software! What next, free monkeys?! the over use of exclamation points?!?

      Seriously, this is a cool thing.

      Free monkeys? I'll take one. Dial M!

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I haven't read the article yet either, but I also have to agree that everyone claiming to have open this or that is getting old really really REALLY FAST.

        If I can't openly distribute it then what's the point? If they have patents covering the stuff then spending hours, days, weeks, months, etc combing through 100K lines of code to glean ideas is pointless, because a) I can't use them and/or b) any improvements I make are still locked down by the original patents.

        OK, now to rad the article :-)
    • It's ok, it's only the press release that's JPLed. Has anyone submitted a record to Freshmeat yet? If it's taken the higher-ups this long to discover Open Source, despite their own engineers having developed a good percentage of it, I'm not sure I'd trust them to track it as well.
    • If you're a US tax payer, you've already paid for this software.
      • If you're a US tax payer, you've already paid for this software.

        Erm . . . no you havent. Maybe if the Govt created it, but it came from Caltech, not NASA.
        • GP: If you're a US tax payer, you've already paid for this software.

          P: Erm . . . no you havent. Maybe if the Govt created it, but it came from Caltech, not NASA.

          Caltech donated it? Gee, that was sure nice of them.
        • Under which DoD grant did CalTech write it?
        • It was developed with fund provided by NASA.
          However they seem to retain all rights for its commercial use.
          Hmmm
          • JPL, while a NASA center, is really an FFRDC. JPL employees are not Civil Servants. They're Caltech employees and government contractors.

            Most work done for the government for hire has ownership rights for the company doing the work. That's the only way you can get private industry to do anything. The government gets what it pays for, and the company doing the work maintains ownership of the product.

            If the government pays for something, the government, by contract, gets a non-exclusive and free license to

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by UncleTogie (1004853) *

          If you're a US tax payer, you've already paid for this software.
          Erm . . . no you havent. Maybe if the Govt created it, but it came from Caltech, not NASA.

          FTA:"CLARAty development was primarily funded by the Mars Technology Program [nasa.gov] and it serves as the integration environment for the program's rover technology developments."
    • Err, nowhere in the summary does it mention the JPL as a license, it mentions the JPL as an entity which just so happens to be the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

      However if you did RTFA you'd notice that the license [nasa.gov] shouldn't be considered "Open Source."

      • Re:Mod Parent Redundant/Wrong/Just Plain Stupid. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by mrchaotica (681592) * on Wednesday June 20 2007, @06:44PM (#19588431)

        However if you did RTFA you'd notice that the license shouldn't be considered "Open Source."

        No, it qualifies as "Open Source" -- what it doesn't qualify for is being called "Free Software."

        • No, the parent was right. (Score:4, Informative)

          by gr8_phk (621180) on Wednesday June 20 2007, @07:22PM (#19588803)
          If you read the license, you'll notice that you are not allowed to use the code for commercial purposes without paying a royalty and getting a different license (this one doesn't allow commercial use). Because of this, it does not qualify as Open Source (OSI definition) or Free (FSF definition) unless you're using another definition for one of these common licensing terms. For once we don't need to debate the merits of one or the other, because this license is neither.

          • Nope, you are wrong: (Score:5, Informative)

            by geekoid (135745) <dadinportland.yahoo@com> on Wednesday June 20 2007, @07:53PM (#19589083) Homepage Journal
            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source [wikipedia.org]

            "The term is most commonly applied to the source code of software that is made available to the general public with relaxed or non-existent intellectual property restrictions."

            This has relaxed IP restriction. It can be used by any one for non commercial use.

            OS and FS are often combined on slashdot, mostly because linux is both.

            • Sorry, bullshit on wikipedia doesn't mean a damn thing. The definition of Open source is well understood, and does not merely mean one can see the code. The definition is maintained by the Open Source Initiative. It fails part one of the definition. Broken part of the definition pasted below.

              1. Free Redistribution

              The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The

              • And here I thought that 'Open Source' was a trademark and something you had to clear it with Bruce Perens or somebody like that to use to describe your software project.
                "Open source" is a generic term in the United States, but "OSI CERTIFIED" is a certification mark, which applies to any computer program under a license on OSI's approved list.

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