Impact of libre software tools and methods in the robotics field

Abstract

Software is one of the major components of robots; in fact, it is the main bottleneck for the proliferation of robotics in our everyday lives. In the last years the field of robotics has been an emerging application area of the libre (free/open source) software phenomenon. Libre software tools have been traditionally popular among the robotics research and teaching community. Even companies whose main business model is to sell robots have found convenient to share the software in order to promote a community around their products. In this paper we analyze the situation of libre software in these three subareas: industry, teaching and research. In particular, we describe commercial robots like the Cye and the Pioneer, a software platform like Orocos as a examples of industrial world applications, the libre tools around the LEGO Mindstorms in the case of teaching, and the Robocup competition and the Player/Stage platform in research area. All these cases show that libre software can act as a catalyst in the robotics industry which is still a sector in its early research and industrial stages