An open source iCub robot mounted on a supporting frame. The robot is 104 cm high and weighs around 22 kg

Open-source robotics is a branch of robotics where robots are developed with open-source hardware and free and open-source software, publicly sharing blueprints, schematics, and source code. It is thus closely related to the open design movement, the maker movement^[1] and open science.

Requirements

Open source robotics means that information about the hardware is easily discerned, so that others can easily rebuild it. In turn, this requires design to use only easily available standard subcomponents and tools, and for the build process to be documented in detail including a bill of materials and detailed (`Ikea style') step-by-step building and testing instructions. (A CAD file alone is not sufficient, as it does not show the steps for performing or testing the build). These requirements are standard to open source hardware in general, and are formalised by various licences, certifications, especially those defined by the peer-reviewed journals HardwareX and Journal of Open Hardware.

Applications

Applications to date include:

• Robot arms, e.g. PARA^[2][3]

• General purpose mobile robots. e.g. OpenScout^[4]
• Domestic tasks: vacuum cleaning^[5][6], floor washing and automated mowing.
• Robot sports including combat robots and racing ^[7]
• Humanoid robots, e.g. iCub
• Self driving cars. e.g. OpenPodcar^[8]
• Laboratory robotics such as chemical liquid handling ^[9]
• Education^[10]
• four-legged robots such as Quad-SDK for large agile (compatible with the ROS),^[11][12][13]
• UAVs such as the quadcopter-drone system Agilicious^[14][15]
• Vertical farming ^[16]
• Swarm robot research, e.g. HeRoSwarm^[17]
• 3D photogrammetry^[18]

Open subcomponents

Most open source hardware definitions allow non-open subcomponents to be used in designs, as long as they are easily available. However many designs try to push openness down into as many subcomponents as possible, with the aim of ultimately reaching fully open designs.

Open subcomponents can include open-source computing hardware as subcomponents, such as Arduino and RISC-V, as well as open source motors and drivers.

Open source robots are often used together with, so are designed to interface to, the open source robotics middleware Robot Operating System and various open source simulators such as Gazebo, running on the open source Linux operating system.

Community

The first signs of the increasing popularity of building robots yourself were found with the DIY community. What began with small competitions for remote operated vehicles (e.g. Robot combat), soon developed to the building of autonomous telepresence robots as Sparky and then true robots (being able to take decisions themselves) as the Open Automaton Project. Several commercial companies now also produce kits for making simple robots.

The community has adopted open source hardware licenses, certifications, and peer-reviewed publications, which check that source has been made correctly and permanently available under community definitions, and which validate that this has been done. These processes have become critically important due to many historical projects claiming to be open source but them reverting on the promise due to commercialisation or other pressures.

As with other forms of open source hardware, the community continues to debate precise criteria for 'ease of build'. A common standard is that designs should be buildable by a smart university student in engineering or computation, in a few days, using typical fablab tools, but definitions of all of these subterms can also be debated.

Compared to other forms of open source hardware, open source robotics typically includes a large software element, so involves software as well as hardware engineers. Open source concepts are more established in open source software than hardware, so robotics is a field in which those concepts can be shared and transferred from software to hardware.

See also

References