The Robotic Operating System, or ROS (download), is intended to operate at the center of behavior-based robotics systems. ROS is an operating system within an operating system, running as a normal program on UNIX-like systems and acting as an operating system for a set of other normal UNIX programs and scripts. ROS is used only to start, stop, and provide other services to behaviors, but without behaviors would perform no function. While a behavior might, technically, run without ROS, it would not fit into a system of behaviors and so would not be useful.
Introducing the Robotic Operating System
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Eugenia Loli
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From a quick glance it looks cool. AI is the next level of computing. If you want computers to make a leap in useability, they have to be able to “understand” what you are doing…or at least be able to react to stimulii.
I looks like it’s the evoultion of batch and cron. I was always surprised something like this wasn’t first toyed with under BeOS. Something like this would work even better with Be’s standardized message model…something like this could monitor BeMessages being passed for patterns and simply interject it’s behaviors as additional messages.
But it’s a step…it looks similar to how ER1 works by acting as a monitor that can couple to normal procedural programs and use them as blocks for input and output to make the AI do something meaningful and useful by using standard things like sound and video systems already supplied with your computer.
Well, nice try, could be usefull in a number of applications especially if adapted to run on a suitable embedded system and take control of peripheral devices.
However, it wouldnt be as usefull in applications like mabhater suggests because of the amount of information to be processed.
First of all, there will be a time lag and we all know how hatefull that is.
Secondly there will be a leak of processing power towards the OS instead of the user and this can cause all sorts of troubles…
So…..that thing is nice if you have a mindless robot around…
I think scaling could be a problem if he uses XML as the storage medium for the behaviours.
If an input comes in and a big XML file has to be parsed each time the sockets aren’t going to be the problem.
I would think a fast, basic database may be a better option.
But I guess this is research, not a product so it more important to get the concept to a working stage before worring about scaling. In this case XML is probably fine for now and if anything makes life easier.
The behaviours expressed in XML notation can be stored in a database. So the big XML file has to be only parsed once.
Carsten
This OS is for educational purposes.., right??