Ever wonder why it has taken so long for your robot butler to arrive? It's 2013, so why aren't those long-promised robotic domestic servants helping out around the house yet?

One reason for the delay: Robot engineers lacked a common platform on which to communicate and collaborate with one another. Robotic hardware and software systems had to be built from the ground up every time. 

Open Source Robotics

But just as open-source operating systems for computers have amped up digital innovation, the robotics industry has undergone a similar transformation over the last five years. Ever since the advent of ROS (Robot Operating System), an open-source platform on which engineers could build robotic programs and apps, robotic innovation has picked up speed.

On Friday, robot engineers from around the world gather for the second annual ROScon in Stuttgart, Germany. Meanwhile, ROS has become a requirement for several high-profile DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) robotics projects - in this year’s DARPA Robotics Challenge, every contestant will use ROS.

"ROS has also started to appear in job listings and on resumes," said Tully Foote, ROS Platform Manager at the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF). "At robotics conferences and presentations, most people are using ROS on their robots," Foote said, "and those who are not often justify why the are not using ROS if they are not."

“ROS is distinguished by its focus on building a community of collaborators,” Foote added. “From its inception, ROS has been designed to facilitate sharing of the software between members of the worldwide robotics community.”

Leveling The Robotics Playing Field

Steve Rainwater, a robotics expert and blogger at Robots.net, agrees that ROS is today’s "leading software framework for robotics," because it integrates exceptionally well with prior robotics research frameworks. 

“There have been other projects that tried to write complete robot operating systems from the ground up, but where [ROS creators] Willow Garage got it right is they understand how open source works,” Rainwater said. “They invent the parts they need and integrate them with the parts that already exist.”

ROS "keeps the playing field level to an extent between students and hobbyists at one end of the spectrum and governments and universities at the other," Rainwater added. "Improvements to robot software can come from either end of that spectrum and because of the way free software licenses work, everyone's contributions are accessible to benefit the entire community."

How ROS Works

Robotics research center Willow Garage invented ROS to solve the common platform problem. Today, the platform is overseen by the nonprofit OSRF to ensure that is remains easy to share and distribute. 

As an example of how ROS works, imagine you’re building an app. That app is useless without hardware and software - that is, your computer and operating system. Before ROS, engineers in different labs had to build that hardware and software specifically for every robotic project. As a result, the robotic app-making process was incredibly slow - and done in a vacuum. 

Now ROS, along with complementary robot prototypes, provide that supporting hardware and software. Robot researchers can shortcut straight to the app building. And since other researchers around the world are using the same tools, they can easily share their developments from one project to another. 

What Hath ROS Wrought?

The PR2, Willow Garage’s most sophisticated robot (built on ROS), has been prototyped to a variety of apps already. It can walk the dog, fold the laundry, bring you a beer and even plug itself in when it senses its battery is running low. At $400,000, it’s designed for researchers, not customers, and only 60 exist so far. 

“One of the ones I consider most impressive is the PR2 and Rosie making pancakes in Munich,” said Foote. “This is a demonstration of situational awareness, multiple robots coordinating, perception of deformable objects and they are doing it repeatedly with many visitors watching.” 

We're still a long way from affordable, personal robot assistants doing real work in homes and institutions. But the common ROS platform is helping roboticists create workable robot butlers - and many other useful robotics applications - far sooner than would have otherwise been possible.

Images courtesy of Willow Garage.

IBM spends over $1.5B every quarter in research and development (R&D) expenses. SAP? Closer to $700M. Oracle? Assuming we don't count the tens of billions it spends buying other companies, its actual quarterly R&D budget comes in just over $1B - around $900M. Microsoft, which has printed billions of dollars in profit each quarter for eons, spends more than them all, topping $10B each year.

And yet not one of these companies is responsible for the biggest advances in enterprise technology in the past decade.  Cloud computing, Big Data, mobile... they're all being invented elsewhere, not by the enterprise behemoths.

Maybe they're doing it wrong?

Lots Of R, Little D

Take the cloud, for example. Microsoft claims to invest 90% of its R&D budget on cloud computing, but it is Amazon, Microsoft's penny-pinching, book-retailing neighbor, that sets the terms for innovation in cloud computing. Amazon launched EC2 back in 2006, when it was spending a measly $132M or so each quarter on R&D. 

Even if we dismiss Amazon, where else are we seeing other cool advances in cloud computing? Netflix, for one, which just released Janitor Monkey to help Amazon Web Services (AWS) users dispose of their unused AWS resources, and the video company previously released Chaos Monkey, which helps enterprises plan for and architect around cloud failure.

Notice the word I used? "Released." It means these tools were open sourced, not put out for sale. That's how innovation seems to happen in the 21st Century.

In large part innovation comes with an open-source license because it's a by-product of businesses that heavily rely on technology, but don't actually sell technology.  It's 'trickle-down innovation' from the web business community.

VMware's Brad Hedlund spotlighted this trend back in 2011, when the enterprise awoke to discover it had problems that the web giants had already solved:

As properties such as Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Amazon became great successes, their architects and software engineers realized that they had moved mountains...The tremendous problems of efficiently running large scale applications on low cost infrastructure had been solved... At the very same time, enterprise IT begins to encounter some of the very same problems solved by the large web provider, such as scalable data warehousing and analytics (so called “Big Data”). Additionally, the software driven distributed systems that solve problems of infrastructure efficiency and management at very large scale could also be applied to infrastructure at a smaller enterprise IT scale (why not?). And finally, the cost savings of an application infrastructure designed to operate on low cost commodity hardware can be realized at any scale, large web or enterprise IT.

Filling The R&D Gap

Companies like Cloudera, DataStax and others stepped into this gap, taking the open source (or, in the case of some of Google's research, open knowledge) projects from the web and applying them to the enterprise in the form of Hadoop, Storm, NoSQL databases, etc.  All of it developed at a comparative pittance to enterprise incumbents' R&D budgets.  All of it available free of charge on commodity hardware. 

As an industry, we're richer for such open source innovation.  Ironically, so are the enterprise IT vendors, who are investing tens to hundreds of millions of dollars in Hadoop and other open source data and cloud innovations, even as they continue to sink tens of billions of dollars into their homegrown R&D. Maybe it's time for them to reevaluate how they do R&D.  Maybe, like Facebook or Twitter, they should release their R&D on GitHub as open-source code.  At the least they could, like Google, centralize their research on the web, making it easily available to all.

Maybe, just maybe, they'd realize that it doesn't actually matter how much money a company spends on R&D.  What matters is whether it can execute and turn ideas into winning products, as Brad Reed argues, and whether it can help foster community around promising open source efforts.  

This is what new enterprise IT - Facebook, Twitter, Google and Yahoo - demonstrates.  It remains to be seen if IBM, Microsoft and other traditional IT vendors are paying attention.  Unless they do, they'll lose relevance as a new breed of innovative startups emerge to claim the strategic largesse of CIOs' budgets.