[ros-users] Software Status Reporting and Custom Builds

Dejan Pangercic dejan.pangercic at gmail.com
Tue Sep 24 16:17:41 UTC 2013


Thibault,
any company if it can it will take open source implementation, at
least as a baseline option. It can of course happen that they will
later contact a developer to get add-on features. However for now they
(Bosch is using ROS for research projects) are wary to use ROS since
there is no connection to standardized code quality indicators at all.
That of course being only one of the reasons.

I will also say that we haven't started doing these metrics just
because we get bored here. Obviously we talk to other industrial
partners and ROScon participants and to have a way to quickly infer
software quality, possibly against some industrial standard [1] was
identified as one of the biggest needs. I know that ROS is still
predominantly research community that often couldn't care less about
such issues but that is also why we are not forcing them as the
de-facto quality view.


[1] - http://portal.automotive-his.de/images/pdf/SoftwareTest/his-sc-metriken.1.3.1_e.pdf

D.
On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 1:51 AM, Thibault Kruse <kruset at in.tum.de> wrote:
>
> On 24.09.2013 02:12, Dejan Pangercic wrote:
>>>
>>> Selling ROS (even for free) to a company is a marketing problem, it is
>>> about
>>> maintaining a community, a pretty website and advertising, finding
>>> reference
>>> customers speaking up for the product, and so on.
>>
>> Thibault this is unfortunately very wrong. Selling ROS is right now
>> rather a technical problem. Say you have
>> $10 available for your micro-controller. And that one has to be
>> certified, has to support some sort of encryption to protect IP, etc.
>> So you end up with the chip like this:
>> http://www.atmel.com/Images/doc6462.pdf, note 266MHz. Now you go, put
>> ROS on it and have it run drivers, task-executive, perception,
>> planning and control software.
>> Having metrics like this will not help us with getting ROS to scale to
>> something like this but it will help us convince the industry that
>> coding standards used in ROS are solid and would give us the code that
>> would run on somewhat more powerful processor(s) - which industry
>> would not have hard time to spend more money on.
>>
>>
>> Also, we do not want to force anyone to use the metrics but it is for
>> now the only way to (quickly) asses the quality of the code,
>> especially if it has been orphaned due to the lack of human resource.
>
> Hi Dejan,
>
> given that you work at Robert Bosch LLC, you kind-of represent "the
> industry", don't you (as opposed to academia)?
> And if Bosch as a company would like a vendor to provide some code, maybe
> Bosch can negotiate that directly?
>
> cheers,
>   Thibault
>
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-- 
Dejan Pangercic
Autonomous Technologies Group
Robert Bosch LLC
Office: +16505657403
Cell: +16508610951
E-Mail: dejan.pangercic at gmail.com
WWW: http://ias.cs.tum.edu/people/pangercic


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