2008/10/17 Bryan Bishop <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Bob, it's already happening behind your back, and I'm not talking > about iCub. While platform standardization is important, there's other > things that you can do like write cross-platform compatible > applications and compilers, or working on rounding up all of the GPLed > source files that are scattered across the web for software that > people have released but nobody has ever really collected, and such.
Cross platform code is not really a major issue. The basic problem is that if I expend a lot of time and effort developing a super manipulation program for a robot arm can someone else then take that code and reuse it, without needing to make a prohibitive number of changes or necessarily understanding the algorithms in detail. If the answer to this is "yes" then open source robotics is really possible. The history of robotics, certainly in the industrial realm, is one of multiple proprietary and mutually incompatible systems, with very little in the way of code reuse. Imagine if every time you bought a new PC you had to manually write an operating system for it yourself before you could begin doing anything useful. Something similar to this has been the situation with robotics for most of its (admittedly brief) history. I am optimistic that things will change though. As always, the price/performance ratio resulting from Moore's law predicts that a real open source movement in robotics will become possible some time soon. A few years ago it almost looked as if a company called "White Box" was about to produce a decent PC based robot for around $1000, but after delays and redesigns the eventual product turned out to be $5000-8000, effectively squashing the chance of it becoming a common platform. Still, I think some company will eventually succeed in producing a mass market PC based robot. ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=117534816-b15a34 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
