Open-Source Software Is Starting to Help Robots Think

When a group of academics started making open-source robotics hardware , a generation of roboticists got years of their lives back. Now, the bigger challenge is getting robots to think—and that’s starting to be open sourced too. The shift is still early, but companies including Hugging Face, Nvidia, and Alibaba have all made significant bets on open-source robotics in the last two years, releasing tools and models aimed at the higher-level work of getting robots to reason, decide, and act. The open source movement that accelerated other AI applications is now being applied to the problem of making robots smarter. If these attempts to bring AI to robotics with open-source platforms succeed, the barrier to building a capable robot could fall as fast as the barrier to building an AI application did. The world ROS built Open-source robotics software has been around since the mid-1990s, with early projects like Carnegie…