The hottest thing in robotics is an open source project you've never heard of | Innovation - TechRepublic

Commentary: The Robot Operating System (ROS) doesn't get a lot of press, but it increasingly powers the robots upon which industrial automation and other functions depend, according to Matt Asay, veteran technology columnist.

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According to recent LinkedIn data, artificial intelligence (AI) jobs are up 74% while data science jobs are up 37% since 2015. Perhaps less visible, but emerging quickly in importance, are the robots increasingly powered by that data science. Small wonder, then, that the second-hottest job in LinkedIn's analysis is the robotics engineer, experiencing growth of 40% since 2015.

While the open source projects behind the rise of data science are reasonably well known (e.g., TensorFlow and Keras, among others), most people aren't aware that robotics is also heavily influenced by open source and, in particular, by the Robot Operating System (ROS). Given the importance of ROS to the swelling open source robotics community, it's worth learning a bit more about it.

The Robot Operating System was born at Stanford 
ROS has been around for over 10 years and has tens of thousands of developers building packages for it. In fact, according to ABI Research, roughly 55% of the world's robots will include a ROS package by 2024...

The Robot Operating System has moved out of academics 
In its original form, ROS was primarily driven by and geared to the academic and hobbyist communities, who built thousands of add-on packages to extend ROS. This extensibility has always been a core mandate for ROS and, as such, Open Robotics (the foundation behind ROS) CEO Brian Gerkey detailed, "We put a lot of effort into defining levels of abstraction (usually through message interfaces) that would allow much of the software to be reused elsewhere."
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Source: TechRepublic