We are entering the robotic age. There was more than one hundred different robots shown at the Aïchi exhibit in 2005 and we can almost count one new robot every week now.

 

This is a very exciting time. However, like PCs in the early 80's, today's robots are totally incompatible in term of software. There is no way to reuse one component from one robot to the other, or to have a real software industry bootstraping. Moreover, the existing custom-made platforms are most of the time rather complex and generally not really adapted to the needs of robotics.

 

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 for more than four years now, 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 and also more than 25 universities, URBI is ready to face the challenges of today's robotics industry.

 

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