A decade of Open Robotics

March twenty second, 2012 is the day all of it started. That’s the day we formally integrated the Open Supply Robotics Basis, the origin of what we now name Open Robotics. The prospect of beginning an organization is each scary and thrilling; however beginning an open-source firm in a distinct segment as specialised as robotics, now that’s terrifying and exhilarating, if not somewhat unorthodox. All we had was a dream, some open-source code, and a few very good mates, an entire lot of them.

We additionally had the wind at our backs. Till March of 2012, Willow Storage had been the stewards of ROS and Gazebo and nurtured it from an concept to a rising neighborhood. Willow had at all times deliberate to have ROS and Gazebo ‘graduate’ to an entity exterior of the Willow Storage; to make any actual progress in robotics required a worldwide effort, not that of a single firm. The catalyst was the DARPA Robotics Problem. When OSRF was employed to create and handle the world’s first-ever robotics simulation occasion, the corporate was up and operating.

Ten years later, right here we’re, an in a single day success a decade within the making! And we couldn’t have completed it with out the assistance of the ROS and Gazebo neighborhood. On this essential day, we needed to look again on what we’ve achieved for and with that neighborhood, the robotics trade, and the world normally.

A simulated Open Robotics birthday cake.

At the beginning, we’ve made a number of ROS and Gazebo releases! After ten years we’ve managed to launch 9 ROS 1 distros, eight ROS 2 distros (about to be 9), eleven Gazebo distros, and developing on seven Ignition distros. The curiosity in ROS has grown to the purpose the place we would have liked tooling to combine a number of robotic methods collectively, so we’ve additionally created a fifth open-source venture, Open-RMF.

Nevertheless, distro releases are solely a part of the story. Alongside the way in which the neighborhood has stored tempo and has continued to introduce an unbelievable variety of ROS packages to reinforce the core capabilities of ROS. Taking a look at simply public Github repositories, there are 5852 repositories tagged for ROS and 707 ROS 2 repositories. To not be outdone, the educational neighborhood has cited the unique ROS paper, “ROS: an open-source Robotic Working System,” 9451 occasions in response to Google Scholar. Our annual builders assembly, ROSCon, is now coming into its tenth yr, and we’re comfortable to report that we’ve had over 8000 attendees, and beneficiant sponsorship from over 150 completely different organizations.

Wanting again through the years, one of the widespread themes in our work is pleasant competitors. We’ve labored with shoppers all around the globe to create life like simulations of just about each robotics area; from factories in NIST ARIAC, to maritime environments in VRX, to catastrophe websites within the DARPA Robotics Problem, we’ve seen all of it! We lately concluded the DARPA SubT competitors, which marks our ninth high-profile competitors efficiently executed, with two extra within the works now. We consider that these pleasant competitions between robotic builders have been one of many driving forces behind our success.

As we’ve grown, we’ve additionally seen ROS and Gazebo communities develop together with us. Final yr, the ROS Wiki had roughly 2.5 million guests, and at the least one customer from each single nation on the globe! In 2011, the primary yr of our document maintaining, we solely served 290,102 ROS binary packages, and in ten years that quantity has soared to 35,036,199 in 2021! Equally, in 2011 we had solely 4517 distinctive guests downloading ROS packages, and as we speak that quantity has grown to 789,956 distinctive guests. That’s 175 occasions extra customers in only a decade! What was as soon as only a handful of researchers and college students is now a world-wide neighborhood of pros, hobbyists, and lecturers.

In our ten years, Open Robotics itself has additionally grown and adjusted. Once we began in 2012 we have been only a handful of individuals working in a small workplace, as we speak we’re a workforce of fifty individuals unfold out throughout the globe, with employees within the US, Singapore, Spain, Germany, and Japan. We’ve mentored dozens of interns, each in-house and thru the Google Summer season of Code and Outreachy applications, who’ve gone on to have profitable careers and a few of whom have even based their very own firms.

A birthday card from one in every of our youngest ROS customers.

It has been a wild ten years and really humbling to see an untold variety of builders and customers assist and construct upon our work. We don’t know what the following ten years will appear like; we might attain the moon, or the underside of the ocean, however we gained’t be capable to get there with out the assist of our open-source neighborhood. We sit up for the following decade!.