ROS Industrial - an Enabler for Industrial Robotics?

The integration of hardware and software components into new automation applications is still a big challenge regarding interface adaptations, communication, conduction of components and integration tests as well as optimization of parameters for the target scenario. In addition, applications in the automation domain are often developed from scratch with only limited software reuse. Using component-based development in combination with reuse of existing software and hardware components promises a significant improvement in efficiency for application development. A prominent example for a widely used component-based framework is ROS, which focuses on code reuse in robotics research and development and offers already great variety of mature robotic soft ware components (e.g. SLAM, motion planning, 2D/3D perception). In this conference methods and procedures for the component-based development with ROS are presented that increase the reusability of existing components. Furthermore, the ROS Industrial initiative is introduced that matches existing ROS components to the needs of industrial applications (e.g. quality assurance, robustness, etc.). Concrete examples how ROS is already used in industrial applications today are given in the conference.