Open Source Robotics (OSR) is an emerging technology trend to broaden the development basis for next generation robotics. Leading robot engineers believe in the development of a standardised robot based on an open-source operating system in order to kick-start the mass production of next generation service robots. Advantages with OSR are lower development costs, interchangeability and platform independability.
French robotics developer Gostai has announced that its core Urbi Operating System for robotics is now going open source. Urbi is an advanced robotics operating system, already available for a large number of robots like Aldebaran® Nao, Segway® RMP or Lego® Mindstorm, among 15 other different robots. One of its main innovations lies in a new orchestration script language called urbiscript, which natively integrates parallelism and event-based programming. Next to Urbi, Gostai also offers the Gostai Studio graphical programming tools, and compatibility with various simulators, making the Urbi framework one of the most advanced and complete solution for robot and complex system programming available today. Urbi is also very simple to use, even for beginners. It is perfectly suitable for advanced industrial or academics applications, as well as for the educational market.
The source code is covered by an Affero GNU GPL v3 license and is available for immediate download and use from Gostai’s website. This initiative will allow developers worldwide to participate in the growth of the industry's most innovative robotic software solution.
Other Open Source Robotics initiatives are i.e. the European OROCOS (Open RObot COntrol Software) project, OpenJAUS, ROS (Robot Operating System) open-source software running on the Willow Garage robots.
