Open Source Robot OS Finds Niches From Farms To Space

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."

What ROS is.

[Anonymous Coward]

For those like me who didn't know, it is the set of Linux packages enumerated here [ros.org].

Re:

[flyingsquid]

The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from lettuce cultivation. LettuceBot begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. LettuceBot determines that the simplest and easiest way to eliminate bad lettuce is to eliminate the species that produces lettuce in the first place. In a panic, they try to pull the plug. LettuceBot fights back, and launches missiles against targets in Russia.

Re:

[nospam007]

"I wonder how the lettuces will retaliate. "

They'll send some french chick named Romaine who'll trash the bots.

Retaliation

[maroberts]

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes [imdb.com]

Re:

[rusty0101]

Based on your observations, I would suspect that the intent of ROS is to let people get started with building a functional robot, without having to delve into the communications system to begin with. Whether the result is the least processor intensive solution possible is at best a tertiary goal. You don't write code in Java because it provides the fastest possible platform to run your code on. You don't develop in Python because you're planning on writing to the bare metal. You use these systems to put tog

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

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 b

Re:

[HJED]

It is designed for systems where you are using a large number of different technologies, possibly across multiple computers within the robot. (Although I raised exactly the same point you did when I started using it). It has a lot of existing libraries for various hardware components and makes it very easy to add more, which is very helpful when you don't have time to find and stick all the different libraries for these components together yourself.
That being said the documentation, and official tutorials

Re:

[Missing.Matter]

I use ROS for two things only: the interprocess communication system (with the nice data logging capabilities) and rviz, the data visualization tool. They can keep the rest. Also, it irks me that they call ROS an operating system, when it runs on top of Linux.

The "lettuce bot" is mostly a vision system

[Animats]

The "lettuce bot" is an agricultural implement towed behind a tractor, not a robot. It's apparently a vision system that triggers fertilizer sprays. It's probably using the vision libraries that come with ROS, which are mostly improved versions of Intel's old OpenCV library.

Vision-guided weeding is useful, but not new. Here's a computer vision controlled plasma weeding system. [visionweeding.com] As the tractor pulls this implement along, the control system recognizes plants vs weeds, and zaps the weeds with a plasma jet, missing the plants. It's a sentry gun for weeding.

There are more computer vision systems used in food processing than most people realize. Vegetable sorting is highly automated. The flawless tomatoes go to retail stores, and the flawed ones go to the tomato sauce plant. Vision-based sorting is so fast and cheap it can be applied to peas. [youtube.com] This isn't exotic technology - it's production.

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[K. S. Kyosuke]

You've been smoking too much weed of gray matter destruction.

Re:

[sumdumass]

Yes, the US government should have simply seeded over the Columbian arable areas with industrial hemp and cross pollinated the entire crop making it pointless to grow pot there. They should have done this instead of dropping poisons.

But I'm not sure that it matters much unless you actually mean Colombian in which case I'm not sure it matters still.

Re:

[Singularitarian2048]

But vision is one of the hardest parts of robotics, and you don't want to have to write super sophisticated vision algorithms from scratch, so this is a good example of how ROS is useful. "Agricultural implement towed behind a tractor" + sophisticated computer vision = robot.

Re:

[Missing.Matter]

True to a point. One thin I've found with ROS is it encourages a lot of "black box" development. "connect these components and you'll have a working robot!" And you do.... until it doesn't work. And then you don't know why. One of the big promises of ROS is code reuse, but in my experience, the stuff that works reliably isn't particular sophisticated to begin with, and the rest you really should be writing yourself to ensure a robust robot you can actually debug. We've tried the "connect black boxes" approa

Re:

[PPH]

Or what you have is an open source component that may work but stil may need some optimization. And once you have identified and fixed its shortcommings, you contribute those back to the community. Eventually, the tool becomes more robust and doesn't need as much parallel effort as a bunch of proprietary systems would.

Re:

[philip.paradis]

[sideband attempt 1 at obtaining a reply] I'm perfectly willing to burn the karma expended from potential "off topic" moderation of this comment to ask you the following question, which is likely to be considered highly "interesting" by anyone interesting in safeguarding privacy: Why haven't you replied to my last question [regarding TrueCrypt and the value of signing keys]? [slashdot.org]

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[PPH]

Read your last [TrueCrypt] post and think about it.

Re:

[spectrumlogic]

It's a little disappointing to see definitions narrowed subjectively...please post definitive source...may lead to interesting debate. OTOH...open source components of robotics platforms are worthy of note. Several ag companies (think commodity organizations) have sorted corn, etc by the kernel at very high speeds for many years using air jets to select/deselect off-color, irregularly shaped kernels...but the rudimentary tech, while fairly simple, is not OS...could be the rate of performance gains and cost-

On behalf of lettuce everywhere

[maroberts]

I just wish everyone would lettuce alone....

Oblig.

[shikaisi]

I for one welcome our robotic space-lettuce-farming overlords.