ROS Efficient Introduction Chapter 1 - ROS History and Current Status

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(1) The information in this article is mainly from "ROS History 36", which was serialized in Gu Yueju. This article sorts out the development history of ROS and even the robot industry well, allowing us to quickly understand all aspects of the development of ROS and robots. Including technology, business scenarios and more.
(2) 36 ROS stories: https://www.guyuehome.com/Blog/index/_cate/ros-history/category/13/p/2

2 finishing after reading

2.1 This shore and the other shore

(1) Mainly introduce several key universities in the east and west coasts of the United States that research robots. The article mentioned Stanford and Silicon Valley, which is the place below.

(2) The article specifically mentions the TED speech given by Vijay Kumar, head of the world-renowned University of Pennsylvania Robotics Laboratory (GRASP: General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception), here is the video link: https: //www.ted.com/talks/vijay_kumar_robots_that_fly_and_cooperate

2.2 68 Willow Street

(1) There is Willow Road in Silicon Valley, and there are many well-known companies, and ROS originated from the "Willow Garage" company at 68 Willow Street. This company is committed to developing personal service robots instead of traditional industrial robot arms, and ros comes out of it. In fact, this place is not a garage, but a villa, but foreigners like stories about starting a business in a garage and changing the world, such as Hewlett-Packard.

2.3 Robot Prom, creator of PR2, origin of ROS, ROS hosted by OSRF, ROS Developer Conference

(1) On May 26, 2010, Willow Garage developed a robot called PR2 (Personal Robot, the second generation of personal robot), and sent them to 11 robot research units around the world.

(2) ROS is the software part of the PR2 project. Willow planned to make ros open source from the beginning. In 2010, Willow officially launched ROS1.0.

(3) The original concept of ROS was expressed in the paper "ROS: An Open-Source Robot Operating System":
ROS is not an operating system in the traditional sense of process management and scheduling; rather, it provides a structured communications layer above the host operating systems of a heterogenous compute cluster. (Translation: ROS is not an operating system in the traditional sense, not for process management and scheduling, but a structured communication layer built on top of other operating systems.)
(4) After several years of development, Willow will not be able to find a profit point for a while. Therefore, in 2012, Willow Garage established the OpenSource Robotics Foundation (OSRF for short ), which is a non-profit organization that operates by accepting corporate donations. . Since then, OSRF has taken over everything from ROS.
(5) In May 2012, OSRF held the first ROS Developer Conference (ROSCon) in St. Paul, Minnesota, USA, and held it every year since then. Morgan Quigley, the father of ROS, made a report on "ROS's Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow". David Lu introduced URDF(Unified Robot Description Format), a special XML file used to define the relative relationship and pose between robot joints. Ioan Sucan introduced Moveit!, a development platform for industrial robot manipulation, which has since become widely used.

2.4 The origin of the ROS turtle, the turtle robot, the turtle designer, the name of ROS and the turtle gang, the first turtle in ROS

(1) The logo of ros is a little turtle, turtle. Every version of ros has a new turtle logo. The reason for choosing the tortoise is that many people in Liushu have played with a programming language LOGO for children since they were young, and there is a little tortoise in it for people to control.
(2) In 1948, American Walter made a robot shaped like a turtle, which was the first robot that moved autonomously in human history. Later, the MIT laboratory also made a robot that looked like a turtle. As a result, the tortoise gradually became synonymous with robots .

(3) The designer of the ros tortoise is Josh Ellingson (Josh Ellingson), and the following are the tortoises of each ros version.

(4) The full name of ROS is Robot Operating System. This name is actually ambiguous. Strictly speaking, it is a distributed communication framework. At that time, Liushu also thought of a lot of names, until he applied for the domain name of ros.org, so he discussed stopped.
(5) The name of each version of ROS is named according to the alphabetical order of the English alphabet. The first version of ROS is called B ROS, which is Box ROS, followed by C, D, and E. In order to name, OSRF also established the ROS Naming Committee. This is the version history link of ros: http://wiki.ros.org/Distributions
(6) The first version of Box Turtle of ROS was completely designed for PR2 in 2010. Those who built the PR2 robot, after the disintegration of the willow tree, founded the remote remote conference substitute robot and hotel service robot, as well as storage robots, palletizing robots and so on. These robots currently have good applications, and they are all derived from ROS.

2.5 ROS navigation and hiDOF, ROS visualization rviz

(1) The most important ability of a robot is autonomous movement, which relies on navigation. The navigation package for ros is written by Eitan Marder-Eppstein.
(2) The purpose of navigation is to allow the robot to go from the initial position A to the target position B without colliding with the surrounding environment. Achieving this goal requires: path planning software, which relies on map building software, which in turn relies on lidar. The sensors that are also needed include wheel speed sensors, IMU inertial navigation, GPU positioning, etc.

(2) There are various common algorithms in the ROS navigation software package, including SLAM mapping algorithm, A* and Dijkstra planning algorithm, AMCL adaptive Monte Carlo positioning algorithm, etc., which can be called directly.
(3) The author of the ros navigation software package later established the hiDOF robot automation software consulting company, which was later acquired by Google.
(4) rviz is the official 3D visual simulation tool of ros, which supports visual display of ros messages, including various sensor data, robot models, coordinate transformation TF, etc., which is very powerful.

2.6 ROS A C turtle - Noah's turtle, ROS object manipulation manipulation

(1) In August 2010, the second version of ros, C turtle, was released. From this, it can be seen that ros will dominate various robotic fields, including driverless cars. In fact, driverless cars are also a kind of robot, and they are also widely used ros for development.

(2) The ROS C-turtle version adds a robot grabbing software package, which is used to detect objects and grab them with a robotic arm. The package is called manipulation. The two people in the picture below are the authors of this package, Kaijen Hsiao and Matei Ciocarlie. Starting from here, the field of palletizing robots was derived, and there is a XYZ Robotics in China.

2.7 ROS Flying King Kong Turtle and Vision Sensor

(1) In March 2011, the ros D version was released, diamondback (Diamondback). At this time, many robot companies have joined ros to provide their own robot drivers.

(2) In 2010, Microsoft launched the XBox with a depth camera. The depth camera is Kinect. This thing was later used by various research institutions. ROS also supported it and provided the driver for this device. The picture below is Kinect. The camera in the middle is an RGB color camera, and the left and right are infrared emitters and infrared CMOS receivers respectively, thus forming a depth sensor to obtain depth data, that is, the distance from objects within the visible range to the camera. From these depth data, a 3D point cloud (Point Cloud) can be calculated. At this time, ROS has joined the Point Cloud Library (PCL)

(3) PCL is an open source point cloud processing software, including a large number of point cloud related algorithms, including displaying point cloud data, filtering, segmentation, feature extraction, matching Accuracy, reconstruction, etc., its status in 3D point cloud is equal to OpenCV's status in image processing. PCL is also derived from willow, the author is Radu B. Rusu (Radu B. Rusu), point cloud processing has been widely used in reverse engineering at that time, but no one has open sourced it.

2.8 OpenCV for ROS, KDL for ROS

(1) OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision Library: http://opencv.org) is an open source computer image processing library implemented in C/C++. The author is Gary Bradski, who worked at intel The author also wrote the famous "Learning OpenCV". His original intention of doing this is to not reinvent the wheel.

(2) OpenCV is added to ros, which improves the usability. Through the vision_opencv software package, users can easily use opencv in ros. It includes two parts: one is that cv_bridge is responsible for converting the image type under OpenCV into ROS image message, and the other is that the image_geometry software package can be used to correct the image, and the calibration parameters received by ros are sent to the opencv image correction function for use.
(3) Ros later disassembled the underlying library and no longer maintained it uniformly, but was maintained by contributors, such as KDL, the abbreviation of Kinematics-Dynamics Library, which means "Kinematics-Dynamics Library", researched by European universities people development.

2.9 ROS Turtle Gang, ROS and Windows, ROS Gazebo, ROS Compilation System, ROS Happy (Player and Stage), ROS Driver DARPA Challenge, ROS MoveIt!

(1) Names of ROS versions: Box turtle (box turtle, 2010.3), C turtle (A C turtle, 2010.8), diamondback turtle (Diamondback, 2011.3), ElectricEmys (chicken blood turtle, 2011.8), Fuerte Turtle (vigorous Tortoise, 2012.4), Groovy Galapagos (Galapagos tortoise, 2012.12) (this version of ros introduces the catkin compilation system, catkin means "tail-like tidbits on the willow tree"), Hydromedusa (South American snake-necked turtle , 2013.9), Indigo Igloo (cyan igloo, 2014.7) (after this edition, ROS was handed over to OSRF, and the members started a global wave of robot entrepreneurship, and China also blossomed everywhere, from 2014 to 2015), Jade Turtle (Jade Turtle, 2015.5), Kinetic Kame (Motion Turtle, 2016.5), Lunar Loggerhead (moon landing turtle, 2017.5), Melodic Morenia (elegant peacock turtle, 2018.5) (2) ROS is getting more and more popular, so many window
developers I also want to use ROS, and on windows, Microsoft also provides some support, such as WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), ROS1 experimental version for Windows, etc. But as a Chinese developer, it is still recommended to play ros on ubuntu, and it is best to use a pure ubuntu system instead of a virtual machine or wsl.
(3) Gazebo is a robot 3D simulation software, which can be used together with ros or alone. Its author is one of the founders of OSRF. Gazebo supports the simulation of physical elements, such as gravity, friction, etc., and is widely used
(4) ros is a very large software system, C, C++, python, it is quite troublesome to organize and compile various software packages, its compilation system It has also been updated several times: rosbuild --> catkin --> ament(ros2), at least the first two are implemented based on cmake.
(5) Player is used to control robot equipment and sensors; Stage is a two-dimensional robot simulation environment.
(6) In 2015, DARPA held a robotics challenge. Of the 23 finalists, 18 used ros and 14 used Gazebo for simulation, and ros succeeded. But the champion of the competition is not the American team, but South Korea. However, China's Hefei Academy of Sciences and the University of Hong Kong either did not enter the finals or were at the bottom. Therefore, the Chinese still have a lot to learn in the direction of robotics.
(7) MoveIt originated from ROS's robotic arm navigation software arm_navigation, which was first used on PR2 and has become the most widely used open source operating software for industrial robots and robotic arms. MoveIt! reduces the dependence on ros, and code reuse is more efficient. Traditional industrial robots have a fixed program and do not perceive the surrounding environment, while MoveIt can support the robot to model the surroundings, autonomously plan the movement path, and dynamically adjust, so as to realize cooperation with humans.

2.10 The story of TurtleBot, the woman behind TurtleBot, the man behind TurtleBot, the evolution of TurtleBot, the IPI of ROS, the secret project PlatformBot love and hate, from the non-profit organization OSRF to the corporate OSRC, the intern program, the Willow Garage Department is flourishing leaf

(1) Since ros is robot software, it is best to have a robot to learn ros . The original PR2 of ros was too expensive and difficult to promote in large quantities, so Willow designed a simple robot platform using patchwork hardware, namely TurtleBot, with open source software and hardware. Among them, the computing platform uses ASUS notebooks, the camera uses Microsoft Kinect depth camera, and the sports equipment uses the sweeping robot iRobot Create, so TurtleBot became popular.

(2) TurtleBot was invented by Tully Foote and Melonee Wise. Melonee Wise (Melonee Wise) is an employee of Willow No. 2, has started multiple businesses, and leads the ROS intern program. Tully Foote is the person in charge of OSRF ROS development. He is keen on unmanned car competitions. I believe he also uses ros in unmanned cars .

(3) After TurtleBot became popular, a Korean company was willing to continue to develop it, so there was a TurtleBot family, of which TurtleBot3 is the latest.

(4) IPI, Industrial Perception, Inc., is a palletizing robot company hatched by Willow. It is oriented towards future e-commerce logistics and uses visual technology to assist in the loading and unloading of goods, item sorting, and loading and unloading of materials. It was later acquired by Google .
(5) Myroni Weiser, who invented TurtleBot, led Willow's PlatformBot project to build a $10,000 service robot, but to no avail. Melonie Weisser later left Willow and founded Fetch Robotics to make a complete set of intelligent storage robots. The earliest fire in this field was Amazon's Kiva, as shown in the figure below.

(6) In 2016, the open source foundation OSRF accepted a donation of one million dollars from Toyota and established the open source robot company (OSRC) with Toyota for profit. This sounds a bit strange. Toyota hopes OSRC will help Toyota research autonomous driving.
(7) Willow and OSRF attach great importance to expanding the influence of ROS. One of the important projects is the intern program. Since then, these people have formed the Willow Department and have had a major impact on the robotics industry. Even if these people are contributors, they are also evangelists.
(8) The status quo The companies directly derived from Willow Garage are changing the world. Now ROS is the de facto universal standard in the field of robotics, just like unix is ​​to OS, TCP/IP is to network protocols, and ros is already a must for robot engineers . All skills , including autopilot engineers, must be mastered!

3 Summary

Although the overall structure of "ROS History 36" is not very good and a bit broken, it does not prevent us from understanding the development history of ros and robots through this article. These are important background knowledge for in-depth study of ros, which can form an overall awareness of the robot industry.

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