What would you use instead of ROS?
I started building a ROS alternative called Mech (see my profile) after becoming frustrated with ROS. It’s getting there but not ready for prime time yet.
To answer the sibling comment, my biggest problem with ROS is how inscrutable it is for undergrads. I’ve witnessed students struggle to even install it while following directions step by step. It is a huge mess of incidental complexity, layering the complexity of C++ build systems on top of an IPC system on top of an expansive middleware.
The learning curve is so high that when I spend a semester teaching robotics, students still struggle with ROS basics at midterms. The course turns into more about learning ROS rather than learning actual robotics.
I’m hoping one day Mech will work along side and in conjunction with ROS to provide an easier way of doing things for those who want to get right to the heart of robotics.
But yes, I recognize the struggle. At my RoboCup team (TechUnited Eindhoven), the learning curve is also steep: from non-CS students that use Matlab on Windows, to using Linux with C++ & Python, ROS, git, not to mention our own stuff on top.
It's a filter, to say the least.
Maybe there's room for an Eve-Mech bridge where Eve can be used on the knowledge representation side, and Mech for the lower-level motion planning stuff. That's a fun thought!
A hybrid system is a really interesting idea. I actually wrote my bachelors thesis on a system heavily inspired by EVE to be used for knowledge representation in robotics and have been experimenting a lot with implementations of the idea over the years. You should really open a Mech discord channel, I'd love to hang around and help build something like that :D.
GPU/FPGA Mech has been my dream since like... forever. I started taking a crack at it here: https://gitlab.com/mech-lang/core/-/blob/gpu/src/bin/gpu.rs, but mostly I was just figuring out wgpu's capabilities in Rust. But that was months ago and I've since decided to push it off until after I launch what I have done already.
I have a private slack that I've been using to work with my students, I'd love to send you an invite. Send me an email at corey@mech-lang.org and I'll send it to you. I've been putting off doing a discord channel because I wanted to code up a chat app in Mech instead :P I think I'm almost there but I've been thinking that for years >_<. If I don't have one by the time I launch in October I'll probably bite the bullet and do discord then.
The issue with ROS isn't the general idea of communicating nodes over a blackboard and the accompanying standard libraries, but the huge pile of low quality tools, sparse documentation, ad-hoc architecture, bad code, and mediocre introspection tooling. A lot of that can be traced back to C++ and CMake, but ROS manages to take already complex tools and make them even more complex in an attempt to make them easy with automagic.
If ROS2 had just opted for ProtoBuffers/FlatBuffers/CaptnProto over MQTT/NATS and build TF et.al as a library over that, we could just point students to the excellent documentation of the Serialisation Format, of the Middleware and to the (with all that freed developer time) much better documentation of the Robotics libraries, and call it a day.
Instead they spend months with the idiosyncrasies of the build system, only to continue struggling with the documentation, and the sub-par tooling when something goes wrong. Cough only two seconds of time travel in ROSBags cough
Check out industry adoption of ROS 2 in various industries including automotive, healthcare and warehouse automation. ROS 2 is (and will remain as) the de facto standard for robot application development.
The atrocious build system has stayed the same. People continue to add even more brittle automagic to the pile. (.e.g. automagic compilation of C++ to FPGAs)
The grown semi ad-hoc messaging semantics for services has stayed the same. Even if DDS was an acceptable foundation, adding a ROS message translation layer and ROS semantics on top of a perfectly valid schema language is bringing the same pitfalls that Object Relational Mappers have, in that you now have to understand three systems, the source, the compiler, and the target. And given that ROS1 had a 'wontfix' issue on the message schema checksums being computed wrongly (ignoring the cardinality of fields), which could result in your robot literally ripping your head of when it received messages from two different library versions, I don't trust anybody from the community to get it right this time.
The whole DDS vendor based ecosystem is antithetical to open source. The DDS standard is way too big, and a bunch of vendors meeting every couple years to demonstrate that their systems can send messages about shapes between one another simply doesn't cut it to prove correctness.
ROS(2) is an attempt to make C++ more easy by layering automagic and complexity on top. Most robot shops I know waste most of their time fighting that magic and complexity. The other ones don't use ROS(2).
ROS should have been:
* A bunch of libraries (not frameworks) to solve robotics, vision, and knowledge representation related tasks.
* A bunch of best practices to work with common middlewares, none of which are developed as part of ROS.
* A repository of competing data schemata for the above libraries and middlewares to facilitate interoperability but allow for experimentation.
* Dataviz libraries for common notebooks, e.g. jupyter, observablehq, that work with the common data schemata.
Instead we got one of the hairiest C++ projects and a bunch of shell scripts to open your default text editor more conveniently. Yay.