[ros-users] [Discourse.ros.org] [ROS-Industrial] Fully Open Source (Industrial) Robotics Controller

[Bas de Bruijn]

First: I'd love to have a full open source stack! Specifically the part where you just want to have a robot do some things.

For this idea to succeed (you want to make money doing this too), you need to know your targets. Will that be companies? A robot manufacturer (startup?) looking to offload support to a community? A manufacturing company which makes products? Why would such a company decide to use another platform if they already have spent serious money on a robot brand, including educating staff and writing programs (sometimes processes are signed of by their customer, which will make it even less interesting to switch)?

In my opinion, in industry, users need an easy way of programming so they "get things done". These users don't go designing robots, they don't have the knowledge/time/money, they don't go tinkering, they don't have the time/knowlege/task to dive into writing nodes and worrying about dds, realtime etcetera. They have a task and want to use a tool to solve a problem.
Companies themselves struggle to hire staff who can perform these (for the ROS community simple) tasks. On a normal level, coming from school. These men and women do not have a university degree.

I think that one of the big missing things in a full stack is the programming language and easy programming for a factory user. All your points about the hardware side are doable.

If you want to have success:

* you need _something_ that companies can buy, proving they can get going. They are mostly interested knowing if the tool can do the job, and what it yields them. Managers mostly decide about purchasing these tools. Concepts as ROS, Open Source or vendor lock-in are second round considerations.
* staff must be able to work with your stack solving a problem, They will help leverage the decision if they tell their Manager that they are able to work with the tools. Possibly even tried out a demo without hardware.
* If people coming from school knowing this programming language and if you're lucky some hardware/software concepts, you'll also solve the problem of companies trying to find educated personnel. Might be an opportunity for the ROSIN project and education.

[quote="machinekoder, post:1, topic:5832"]
How to make money with this business?
[/quote]

* do not underestimate developing and selling a product, and providing support if you're going to provide hardware/software as turnkey solution.
* consultancy would be where you have a starting point.





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