ROP: developing a robotic open platform

Before domestic robots will be part of our daily lives, further large-scale research on both hardware and software is required. In software, the Robot Operating System (ROS) [1] is nowadays acknowledged as a standard software platform that is used by numerous research institutions. This open source software is available to everyone and by sharing knowledge with the community there is no need to ‘reinvent the wheel’, hence drastically speeding up development. Similarly, this paper proposes the Robotic Open Platform (ROP): an open hardware platform available to all (www.roboticopenplatform.org). The more research groups will join and use ROP, the more ROP will become a valuable collection of configurable and affordable hardware components. Our target is that eventually a fully operational service robot can be built for around C15,000 (bill of material).