DARPA-Funded Software Could Usher In the Era of Open-Source Robotics 17
malachiorion writes "The best thing to come out of the DARPA Robotics Challenge, so far, isn't the lineup of nifty rescue bots being developed by teams around the world, or even Boston Dynamics' incredible Atlas humanoid. It's the pumped-up version of Gazebo, the free, open-source robotics simulation software whose expansion and further development is being funded by DARPA. This article has a look at how the software was used in the recent virtual leg of the competition, as well as how it could change the way robotics R&D is conducted (and create more roboticists, with its low-cost, cloud-based architecture)."
Military money makes the research world go 'round. (Score:4, Informative)
The Boeing 707 is a perfect example. The military demand for jets like the B-52 and KC-135 projects heavily influenced the iconic jetliner, and today, the 737 retains many of its design features. The 707 design is so similar to the KC-135 that upon their replacement with newer airliners, most examples were purchased by the military and used as parts for the KC-135 fleet.
Meanwhile, the Internet exists because of DARPA, the Blue Riband is held by a ship designed specifically for conversion to a troopship, and we enjoy any number of advances in a plethora of fields as a result of the space program, originally having its roots not only in the German rockets that attacked Britain but in showing the Russians how far we could lob nuclear warheads with the exact same missile designs.
I'm glad this time it's going open source.
Adult supervision (Score:5, Informative)
What DARPA is providing for Gazebo is adult supervision. They're paying for getting the bugs fixed. Gazebo has been around for years, and like most open-source projects with modest user bases, it sort of worked. Now it's finally getting fixed. It still only installs easily on Ubuntu 12.04, has tons of dependencies including limitations on supported graphics cards, has lots of bugs, and way too many configuration files. But it's now usable.
The "cloud" business is merely a way to make the DARPA competition honest. For competition purposes, the simulator runs in an Amazon AWS instance controlled by DARPA, with the simulated robot controlled through an API that only provides information a real robot would provide. The robot control programs written by competitors can't see the map of the world; all it gets is simulated vision and LIDAR data. It's a lot like the server/client relationship of an MMORPG. Each user has their own server instance; the world is not, as yet, shared.
The "cloud" is not otherwise necessary, or even desirable. For development purposes, you'd usually run the simulator and the control programs on the same machine, or at least a local machine.
A big problem with Gazebo is that the physics engine is only game-quality. Here it matters, because foot/ground contact is what supports the simulated robot, and most game simulators don't do contacts very well. Gazebo is in the process of switching from ODE to Bullet, which should help.