14 DAY TRIAL // Gostai, a company that specializes in robotics software has announced that it is opening up its Urbi operating system. Urbi is a robotics operating system used by a number of very well-known, commercial robots. The company already shared the component architecture and the libraries under an open-source license and will now do the same for the Urbi kernel. Urbi is being released under an Affero GNU GPL v3 license.
“Going open source with a GNU GPL compatible license is the best way to make sure that Urbi will always be available freely for everyone to use, check and share, while maintaining a dual licensing model providing support and advanced features for commercial partners. Coming from an academic research lab, Gostai has always believed in the open-source model and sharing of innovation. It has been a long time since we worked to prepare Urbi for that move, and now it's ready!,” Jean-Christophe Baillie, Gostai’s Founder and CEO, announced in a statement.
The company says that it has opted to open up the sources to the operating system to ensure that users will always have access to a free version of the software to use and modify, independent of Gostai’s future actions. Several components of the software stack were already open-source and now the Urbi kernel, which includes the urbiscript interpreter and scheduler, is also available. Urbiscript is the scripting language used to program robots powered by Urbi.
However, there will also be a closed-source version of the operating system available from Gostai. This version includes support from the company as well as some more advanced features. It also frees the companies licensing it from having to release their modifications under the GPL. Urbi is used by a number of commercial, consumer-level robots including Sony Aibo, iRobot Create, LEGO Mindstorms NXT, Aldebraran Nao, MobilRobots Pioneer, Segway RMP, Meccano Spykee, and others.
Urbi SDK 2.1 is available for download here on Softpedia.