Robot Operating System, the next big thing

As majority of the World still graples with the possibility of having machines (robots) which are so close to human nature that we feel threatened, something new is rising in the field of robotics. The need for standardized software to drive these machines has been a craving of robotics researchers for quite some time now. While others are already embarking on creating laws to govern robots in the future, some of us have decided to focus our attention on this more pressing issue. Because after all, robotocs research won't go anywhwre without the support of known concepts like open source an software re-use. Which is why component based robotics is a thing of today, the challenge being, to be able to have a set of standard (a range would do) robotics components for various whatever applications and have standard software to manage these, just like we have computers all over the world. A number of efforts have been done in this direction, some of thee include general ones like Player (a framework for robotics, quite old and much closet to being accepted as standard, its open source too), ORCA (fully component based and also a great idea), and also specialized ones like Openrave (a planning architecture for mobile robotics developed by Diankov and CMU). But the one that has caught my interest alot is the ROS(Robot Operating System), initially started at Stanford for the STAIR project, but mostly built by Willow Garage. This is what I believe is a close to a full operating system for robotics in the present times. Computation is organized in terms of nodes and a publish/subscribe system in used for communication with support for a number of technologies including XML-RPC. Furthermore, it is compartible with would be competitors like Player and Openrave and a combination of the three (which is what I work with currenlty, gives you just what you need). As we continue to build more of these, it is noteworthy to realize just how this concept is important to robotics research. To find out more about these systems, 'google' them and visit respective pages. ;)