The Robot Operating System (ROS) has a deeper foothold in the robotics industry than you might think. Since it was first developed in 2007, the open-source framework for developing robotics software has found its way into various research projects, and even been embraced by major robotics companies. In 2012 the ROS-Industrial Open Source project was established by Yaskawa Motoman Robotics, Southwest Research Institute, and Willow Garage to extend ROS into manufacturing automation.
A number of major companies have embraced ROS and many offer ROS tutorials and resources to engineers and developers looking to work with their machines.
Here are 10 major robotics companies that use ROS. For a comprehensive list of robots that are compatible with ROS we recommend taking a looking at the wiki on ROS.org.
You can also find further tutorials and software packages for using ROS with various robots on the ROS Github repository.
Chris Wiltz is a Senior Editor at Design News covering emerging technologies including AI, VR/AR, blockchain, and robotics.