Open Source Summit North America 2022

The Robot Operating System (ROS) project was started with a focus on providing a platform to accelerate research in robotic systems. In the more than a decade of the development of ROS it has proven very successful at supporting these use cases. Taking advantage of the powerful open source model and building a worldwide community of contributors has proven very effective at accelerating robotics research as well as in commercial products. With commercial adoption there is growing demand for integration with safety critical systems. At Open Robotics we are working to evolve ROS to be able to support operations in safety critical systems. It has been a slow and steady process and is not yet completed except for very specific use cases. This talk will summarize past work, the current state and future plans to support ROS on safety critical systems in domains such as aerospace, automotive, and medical. Topics covered will include technical improvements such as integration with embedded systems, testing, quality declarations, static analyzers and linters. As well as system design requirements such as selecting subsets of features from the uncertified systems, restricting dynamic behaviors, and maintaining compatibility with the larger uncertified systems for accelerated development.