Technology sharing is one thing, making money is another. Is open source a good business model for robotics? In order to help users create value, what do you need to keep open source? What do these companies think?

The IT economy has been a strong testament to the company's ability to leverage open source infrastructure to build new products and services. If you don't initially rely on tools like Python and GCC, companies like Google won't exist. Without Linux, IBM may not achieve such success from product to service. How many start-ups start with a cloud-managed machine running some respectable LAMP stacks, and more and more cloud-based services are running.

Although these analogies are misleading, the similarities between robots and IT are sufficient to justify this idea. In the field of robotics, we have a number of common problems that need to be addressed, from low-level drivers to advanced capabilities, as well as libraries and tools between developers. Haven't seen a successful robot business, anything that has a competitive advantage. Instead, success comes from a combination and application of technologies that people are willing to pay. The hardest part is figuring out what the robot should do. By working together to solve the problems, we got a better and more reliable solution, and we freed ourselves to let us spend more time to improve the level of the application, which is where we distinguish ourselves.

In other words, I believe open source is a good model for the entire robotics business. Is this model a good model for any company?

of course can. For example, we can see a small and medium-sized company, such as Clearpath Robotics, Rethink Robotics, and Yujin Robot, which directly apply ROS to their products. And we have seen some of the bigger companies, such as Bosch and Toyota, using ROS in R&D and prototyping, which are profitable companies that rely on open source software development to make a sound economic decision. But they all have some "secrets" behind them, or advanced applications, configuration parameters, custom open source code, or hardware design.

And it's best to do this: unless you are in a pure consulting business (selling your time), you need to own and control some of the things that make up the foundation of your product or service.