We are entering the robotic age. All over the world, we see research projects and companies working on realistic, market driven robots, with impressive realizations ranging from intelligent vacuum cleaners to humanoid robots.

 

This is a very exciting time and some people see in the current situation many common points with the early days of the computer industry. However, like PCs in the early 80's, today's robots are still incompatible in term of software. There is yet no standard way to reuse one component from one robot to the other, which is needed to have a real software industry bootstraping. And most attempts have been failing to provide tools genuinely adapted to the complex need of robot programming.

 

Here at Gostai, we believe that the industry needs a powerful robotics software platform, ready to face the challenges of Artificial Intelligence and autonomous robots programming.

 

The four key requirements for such a universal platform are:

  • Flexiblity: works with any robot, OS or programming language.
  • Modularity: integrates a modular component architecture, with components transparently running embedded in the platform or on a remote computer.
  • Power: robotics is a complex domain, we need powerful abstractions for parallelism and event-based programming and we need more than a toy solution for expert researchers in AI.
  • Simplicity: None of the above should be hard to master or should require hundreds of pages of documentation. Kids and hobbyists shall be able to use the platform as well: this will stimulate creativity and will benefit to robotics in general.

Urbi, who has been developped by leading Universities in Artificial Intelligence since 2003, is today the only universal robotic platform that fits with all the four above requirements. With thousands of users all around the world including hobbyists, companies and also more tens of universities, Urbi is one of today's most innovative solution to face the challenges of the robotics industry.

 

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