The Robots of Tomorrow: Open Platforms & Open Standards for On-Demand Applications

Advances in robotics science, together with the availability of better hardware at lower price, are broadening the potential scope of application of robotics and automation. At the same time also traditional, well-established application areas are about to benefit from such scientific and technical advances, which can address the need for increased flexibility that new manufacturing paradigms demand for. Market data and comparisons with other technology markets, such as the smartphones one, suggest that after many years of sustaining, iterative innovation, robotics is quickly becoming subject to disruptive innovation patterns. A wider and more complex domain will become more difficult to dominate within single organizations by means of vertically integrated, proprietary stacks. We thus argue that technology stacks based on open-source software and standards, supporting open platforms, will be the only viable solution for the robotics and automation technology of the future. The Robot Operating System (ROS) already proved to be an effective "software catalyst" in the context of service and research robotics, and current results demonstrate great promise for its adoption in industrial environments as well. The ROS-Industrial effort was started in order to accelerate the adoption of ROS in production environments through specific technical development, collection of industry-specific requirements and technical training and dissemination.