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

[Thilo Zimmermann]

Dear @machinekoder,

thank you for your post . And thank you @fkromer, @Jmeyer, @shaun-edwards, @vmayoral, @gbiggs & @basdebruijn for adding valuable answers to this thread.

And to answer your introductory questions: Yes, ROS Discourse is the right forum to discuss this :-)

>From a point of view of ROS-Industrial Consortia (in the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific) you mention a lot of issues that we 've looked at it in the past, and as my previous speakers/posters have already expressed: some of it is tempting, most of it could be possible, and all have been on the radar (which does not make it less right or wrong).

As you remember from our last collaborations (thanks again for your support at sprint tech workshop & https://discourse.ros.org/t/world-ros-i-day-july-11/5087/ at IPA), the devil is in the details (e.g. see comments from @Jmeyer like: safety, cost, and support reasons). Therefore, we use official industrial robot controllers.

If you want to challenge this (and think, you can find potential customers that don't have that restrictions), I personally would encourage you and others to further investigate in developing a fully Open Source Industrial Robotics Controller. In that respect: great offer, @vmayoral, for offering to allocate some resources and contributing with such a project.

So far there was not a sufficient alignment of the _significant_ resources involved in such effort (think about the safety certification costs alone) to pull this off. If anybody has more links, please add them to this post/thread.

As you and @vmayoral are both based in Europe, you could even apply for some EU funding for a Focused Technical Projects ([FTP](https://discourse.ros.org/t/rosin-submission-deadline-for-proposals-coming-up-september-14/5756)) via the ROSIN project (http://rosin-project.eu/ftps) and give it a try.

Good luck!

@gavanderhoorn, @mrobinson, @mirko-b, and Thilo





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