One ring to dominate them all ... that's what you will have thought when reading the title. Well, in this case it is a project of robotics to create a small device that is slightly larger than a € 2 coin but could unify them all. And it comes from the hand of Acutronic Robotics, a company that has been funded by DARPA and Sony to launch their device H-ROS SoM. A hardware that makes the modularity of robots possible.
If you follow the world of robotics closely, you surely know the ROSCon 2018 conference where some news of the sector and also IROS are presented. Well, it is precisely there where Acutronic Robotics unveiled the modularity research for robots that it was developing two years ago, and now it has given its fries. If you are wondering what it has to do with ROS with Linux, I recommend that you look for information about it and you will understand ...
Well, H-ROS is a ROS (Robot Operating System) or robot operating system together with a hardware. It comes to the market after two years of intense development, and the development of its standardized software and hardware infrastructure that the company has created to create modular robots. You may think that modularity was already possible, and it is true, but with some barriers. With H-ROS SoM, however, you can have modularity independent of the component supplier, so that all of them would be compatible without restrictions.
SoM greatly simplifies the process of integrating modular robot parts, reducing cost and time to market. This will give a boost to the robot industry and will unify robots as we have said, since all components from all kinds of manufacturers can be converted to native ROSThat is, they will speak in the same "language" and communicate with each other for operation. In addition, it will provide automatic updates, a high-speed communication bus (Gigabit Ethernet), synchronization and Real-Time capability with a real-time OS or an enhanced industrial-grade ROS 2.0 configuration.
MARA, is the arm that you see in the main photograph of this post and it is the first modular collaborative robot built with H-ROS. But that's just one example, many more will come ...
Be the first to comment