New ROS Robots website: robots.ros.org

We’re happy to announce a new portal to explore and share ROS robots. http://robots.ros.org

This is a replacement for the wiki page http://wiki.ros.org/Robots as a portal for discovery of ROS robots and hardware components but should not replace either the technical documentation on the wiki, or the robots own website or homepage.

We’ve been working on this in the background for a while. And the impetus to make the switch has come from our server metrics showing that the previous page http://wiki.ros.org/Robots was causing a large fraction of our server load on the wiki, and contributing to ongoing load based service outages.

I want to give a very special thanks to @sloretz for helping migrate much of the content from the wiki into the site.

Of course this is envisioned as a site built on community contributions like the wiki has been already. It’s hosted on Github Pages and the source is here: https://github.com/ros-infrastructure/robots.ros.org and there’s a guide to contributing here: http://robots.ros.org/contributing/

The new site is much faster while giving more information and has opportunities to add new features in the future. As always contributions are appreciated for both content or improved infrastructure.

3 Likes

The new tag-based search is really great.

I noticed there is no link to a Universal Robot ROS package like https://github.com/ros-industrial/universal_robot or https://github.com/ThomasTimm/ur_modern_driver

Are these drivers considered unstable/experimental and therefore not listed?

Yaskawa Motoman drivers, e.g. http://wiki.ros.org/motoman_driver (https://github.com/ros-industrial/motoman) seem also to be missing.

I’m glad you like it.

In our porting process we skipped any listing that had fewer than 3 sentences on their wiki page. As the Universal Robot page had a broken link to a non-existant Portal page in the old Robots page so it was skipped when we ported. A contribution for that would be great.

Likewise this had a broken link listed so it was skipped. A contribution for this would also be great.

When adding the robots to robots.ros.org it’s also recommended that a standard developer entry point be added at http://wiki.ros.org/Robots/<RobotName> In this location for things like the Univeral Robot there could be references to the two different available drivers etc.

Edit:
Sorry my previous statement was a little in error, those packages didn’t have broken links(they were relative to the backup of the page we used), but had links to package documentation which is different than the Robot portal page.

Great work!

Could we add Pepper and Romeo robots?
http://wiki.ros.org/romeo
http://wiki.ros.org/pepper

That would be great. Note that Pepper is already there but I would encourage you to maybe add an embedded video or some more pictures and a fuller description to make the page more engaging as well as fill in some more tags. And the Romeo would also be a great addition as well.

The Contribution Guide explains how to propose changes.

And to anyone else who has a ROS robot that’s not currently there. Please put together a PR for adding it as well. This is a site for community and by the community, we simply seeded it from the previous wiki content to bootstrap it.

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