Open Source Robot OS Finds Niches From Farms To Space 36
jfruh (300774) writes "Blue River Technology built a robot named LettuceBot that uses computer vision to kill unwanted lettuce plants in a field. Rather than build their creation from scratch, they built off of the Robot Operating System, an open source OS that, in the words of one engineer, 'allowed only a few engineers to write an entire system and receive our first check for service in only a few months.' With ROS robots starting to appear everywhere, including the International Space Station, it looks like open source may be making huge strides in this area."
Re:ROS (Score:2, Interesting)
I had to write software that's able to send commands to ROS robots. Since ROS is a framework and I only needed the communication part I just wanted to implement the (tiny) communication protocol myself.
The documentation was extremely vague, incomplete and did not match up with what their code actually did. Some claimed features weren't even implemented, although the code was extremely fundamental and not new or anything.
The code quality was also terrible for an easy task of serializing some data into a 40 byte packet. It also looked extremely Java-like (they basically reimplemented things like ByteArray in C++ instead of using the standard library). They also obviously didn't understand pointers.
I'd audit that code to the maximum before even considering actually using it.