I think the ideas and intentions of ROS, gazebo and co. are great, but in my humble opinion things are a lot more complicated than they should be (as always in the world of software).
First I think that the robotics world has a non-free vibe going on, in particular from industries who are big in the robotics building business. They mostly ship their own broken (sometimes Windows-only) API for their robot and it is mostly a mess. In particular they often do too much stuff, like providing proprietary shitty cartesian path planning or developing strange in-house communication protocols. I know that this is hard realtime territory and stuff is hard, but I feel definitely a tension between the mostly robotics researcher software crowd and the providers of the "real" thing, the actual robot, e.g. a manipulator, which is still in the 100.000 euros.
Secondly I am afraid that ROS is going down the Corba path. The very fact that they ship their own build system (an ongoing debatte on the ros mailing list) rings alarm bells for me and I hope that they can move forward. However, kudos to the developers! Robotics is a hard and interdisciplinary topic, so one inherits all the problems of the software AND hardware world.
Personal rant incoming:
I think the ideas and intentions of ROS, gazebo and co. are great, but in my humble opinion things are a lot more complicated than they should be (as always in the world of software).
First I think that the robotics world has a non-free vibe going on, in particular from industries who are big in the robotics building business. They mostly ship their own broken (sometimes Windows-only) API for their robot and it is mostly a mess. In particular they often do too much stuff, like providing proprietary shitty cartesian path planning or developing strange in-house communication protocols. I know that this is hard realtime territory and stuff is hard, but I feel definitely a tension between the mostly robotics researcher software crowd and the providers of the "real" thing, the actual robot, e.g. a manipulator, which is still in the 100.000 euros.
Secondly I am afraid that ROS is going down the Corba path. The very fact that they ship their own build system (an ongoing debatte on the ros mailing list) rings alarm bells for me and I hope that they can move forward. However, kudos to the developers! Robotics is a hard and interdisciplinary topic, so one inherits all the problems of the software AND hardware world.