O'Reilly Open Source Convention - August 1-5, 2005

Session
The Open Source Path to Autonomous Robots
Joe Bosworth, CEO, Smart Robots, Inc.
Joe Monti, Software Engineer, Smart Robots, Inc.

Track: Emerging Topics
Date: Wednesday, August 3rd, 2005
Time: 4:30pm - 5:15pm
Location: E144
Open source software is not just a set of evolving tools for the new evolving technology of autonomous robotics. It is the only tool-set, culture, and organizing paradigm within sight today that can ultimately deliver on the promise of sentient machines.

In this session, Bosworth and Monti present and describe an organizing structure for software that will be particularly familiar to Linux developers and which, itself, will enable robot software developers to apply the emerging tools of the open source community, particularly Linux, MySQL, Apache, OpenSSH, and others to come, to the task of developing autonomous robot functionality and applications.

Yes, autonomous robots incorporate electronics, motors, mechanical devices, sensors, batteries, computers, and networking, but all assembled in a closely bound physical architecture and brought to life by a networked “nervous system” that acquires, transforms, stores, interprets, processes and promulgates data throughout the system – making it work.

The network is not only internal, but directed outward as well, wirelessly linking robots to robots, and robots to users, locally and over the web. As the web links any person and/or device from any point in the world to any other point in the world reachable by the web, so it is with our robots as part of that mix.