Open-source projects for autonomous robotics and systems: A survey

Abstract

Open-Source has not only removed the monopoly of the few technological companies, but has also distributed the knowledge, at no cost. With knowledge moves on from person to person, and each person adds his/her contribution to the past work, a knowledge production chain keeps rolling, greatly reducing the effort to re-invent wheels. It allows the public availability of data and enables the addition, modification, and edition of data more efficiently at a faster pace. Robots, considered as a replacement of man-power are of meticulous interests for researchers in the past few decades. Their immunity to walk and talk more or less like a human is worth praising, but this radical change was not so obvious a decade or two ago before the wide propagation of open-source, the continuous spread of research work around the world allows the brilliant minds to add their pieces to incrementally growing joint efforts. It has revolutionized the robotics from the simple remote-control cars to the self-driven cars. This survey summarizes main stream open source projects emerging in recent years and expects to increase the exposure of existing open source projects and increase the popularity of them, with an intention to further reduce unnecessary effort to re-invent existing systems.