Background

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Robotics competitions tend to start off with rapid innovation, but after a couple of years, development seems to “slow down”. One reason for this lies in the way research output is usually shared.

Teams aren’t publishing research output in a form that can be directly used outside their domain.

Software written by teams aren’t being reused much between different:

  • Teams

  • Competitions

  • Robotic projects

Publishing code in a way that can be transferred to a different domain is a whole challenge in itself, which many robotics competitions often do not tackle very well. With limited team resources, winning is usually a higher priority over code-sharing.

The consequence is that new teams joining the competitions reinventing the wheel, to a point that they don’t have time to focus on the research aspect.

ROS Sports is an organization set up to address this concern by encouraging writing reusable code. Focus is shifted away from winning, and is placed on the progression of robotic competitions and its contributions to the robotics community.

We aim to develop and maintain high-quality open source solutions for building blocks of robot sports, such that teams can focus on the competitive research aspect of robotics competitions.