When a group of academics started making open-source robotics hardware , a generation of roboticists got years of their lives back. Now, the bigger challenge is getting robots to think—and that’s starting to be open sourced too. The shift is still early, but companies including Hugging Face, Nvidia, and Alibaba have all made significant bets on open-source robotics in the last two years, releasing tools and models aimed at the higher-level work of getting robots to reason, decide, and act.
The open source movement that accelerated other AI applications is now being applied to the problem of making robots smarter. If these attempts to bring AI to robotics with open-source platforms succeed, the barrier to building a capable robot could fall as fast as the barrier to building an AI application did. The world ROS built Open-source robotics software has been around since the mid-1990s, with early projects like Carnegie Mellon University’s Inter-Process Communication package and the Player Project in the early 2000s laying the groundwork.
But these were often tied to specific research groups, and the field remained fragmented. The Robot Operating System, ROS, changed that when it made its debut in 2007. By bundling tools and attracting more users, it became the de facto standard. The story of open-source robotics, in many ways, starts there. Despite its name, ROS is not actually an operating system.
Rather, it is a software framework that sits on top of Linux and handles robotic fundamentals like moving data between components, talking to hardware, building maps, planning paths, and supporting developer tools, such as data logging and visualization. Before ROS, every robotics team wrote that infrastructure themselves. It often took a year or two before a lab could get to the
