dora

e, although the future of their stack is unknown now that GM canceled the robotaxi project. The other half of the industry uses some sort of in-house stack built from parts (compare batteries-included frameworks like rails/django to building a backend using libraries like expressjs and sequelize). There is usually some form of pub/sub messaging architecture, because pub/sub is a natural fit for robotics and makes it easier to log and replay/resimulate. Some common things I see are zeromq, vanilla DDS (no ROS), zenoh, or write their own pub/sub (sometimes using shared memory). The messages themselves are often protobuf, flatbuffer, cbor, json, or sometimes just raw c structs. Building your own stack isn't hard, but its much easier if you have used ROS before and know which concepts you want to reuse, rather than reinventing everything from first principles. Some newer robotics frameworks are also starting to spring up which is great to see, for example https://github.com/copper-project/copper-rs and https://github.com/dora-rs/dora There are also frameworks more specifically targeted towards robot learning, for example https://github.com/huggingface/lerobot If people are just starting out in robotics, or just starting a robotics company, I still recommend ROS despite its warts, it is worth learning because it has had such a big influence on the current ecosystem. There is no "right answer" though, many companies have been successful with each approach.

ke Protobuf but worse, esp. for versioning and backwards compatibility), non-determinism and untestability of the pub/sub model (esp. for safety-critical stuff), overengineering and layers of indirection / learning curve, poor performance, and high platform lock-in. Looking at ROS as a robotics noob, it seems like useful 'muddleware' for toy projects, but where every sub-problem that it abstracts away from you can be solved better by other existing tools. I'm looking more into: Mobile Robot Programming Toolkit [1], Yet Another Robot Platform [2], genom3 [3], and Open Robot Control Software [4] (all C++). Or the Rust ones like RoboPLC [5], Dora-rs [6], Copper-rs [7], and Basis [8] (which supports Protobuf!). If you're not using ROS for a "serious" project, do you use other middleware offerings or just pick 'n' mix lower-level libs tailored for your use cases? [1] https://mrpt.org [2] https://www.yarp.it [3] https://git.openrobots.org/projects/genom3 [4] https://orocos.org/ [5] https://github.com/roboplc/roboplc [6] https://github.com/dora-rs/dora [7] https://github.com/copper-project/copper-rs [8] https://github.com/basis-robotics