
Willow Garage and the Making of the Robot Operating System - ilamont
https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-software/wizards-of-ros-willow-garage-and-the-making-of-the-robot-operating-system
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jackhack
It's not exactly encouraging to see, on the Willow Garage ROS website, that
the page seems to have been last updated in 2013
([http://www.willowgarage.com/pages/software/ros-
platform](http://www.willowgarage.com/pages/software/ros-platform)). You'll
instead want to try [http://www.ros.org/](http://www.ros.org/) or go directly
to the installers, located at:
[http://wiki.ros.org/lunar/Installation](http://wiki.ros.org/lunar/Installation)

However, the latest version (Lunar) on OSX is described "This is a work in
progress! It really won't work right now... " and I've verified their
instructions don't work. Instead, you'll want to use this shim:
[https://github.com/mikepurvis/ros-install-
osx](https://github.com/mikepurvis/ros-install-osx)

Hope this saves some folks time.

~~~
dekhn
The Willow Garage page is dead because the company went out of business.

Trying to run ROS on anything but Linux is a waste of time.

~~~
ModernMech
It works well under Windows via the Linux Subsystem, at least the transport
layer (which is what most people I've talked to use it for anyway.)

~~~
dekhn
Ah, OK. I checked, and while transport is fine, it didn't seem to support
cameras or other hardware.

I'd prefer it to be Windows-native, rather than WSL.

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escapologybb
I used the ROS a few years ago with Professor Jenkins at Brown University. It
was great, I sat in my wheelchair in the UK and flew a drone remotely in the
Lab. in Rhode Island using just my head and right index finger. It was great
:-)

It was easy to set up and use and pretty reliable at the time. In a similar
vein I used NodeCopter to do something similar between Yorkshire and London at
a Wired conference as well. That used a web interface and lots of JavaScript
goodness to achieve roughly the same affect. It was loads of fun, but a very
high pressure thing to do to try not to hit journalists in the head with a
drone!

My next big step is to go for the whole FPV experience with my set of
limitations, I started trying to do just that last year but with one thing and
another (read: hospitals and stupid quadriplegic stuff) it didn't come to
pass. It definitely looks like fun though as I had some really cool advice
from Kevin and a few other people. I'm really hoping to get back off the
ground again at some point soon. (See what I did there!)

Here's the video of the nearly hitting the editor of Wired magazine in the
head with a drone in case you're interested:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XM97VvRSRM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XM97VvRSRM)

Edited to add: if anybody from ROS needs a quadriplegic geek to help test
anything, get in touch. :-)

------
im_down_w_otp
Most of my life is figuring out how to get people who've made a whole bunch of
stuff on ROS a way to migrate that stuff, and a platform to migrate it to,
when they get to a point where all that cobbled together R&D work needs to
turn into something safety-critical.

~~~
Jack000
I've always thought ROS was largely meant for prototyping. An http transport
layer for all nodes (even on the same machine) doesn't seem like the right
choice for a production system.

~~~
Waterluvian
Kind of. I've seen the approach of building on top of ROS and incrementally
replacing the weakest link work well. You end up with something that feels
academically wrong to be in production spaces, but you also end up with
something that actually sold and shipped. Establishing a product feedback loop
sooner is more valuable than selling a technically "correct" product.

Also it's TCP (or UDP if you want) not HTTP. ROS2 does one better with DDS.

