The main topic of the discussion was the Robot Operating System (ROS). 

“What is the Robot Operating System?”, “how do we use it?”, and “what are the goals and prospects of ROS in the future?” – these were the main questions designated by the section moderator Albert Efimov, head of Skolkovo Robotics Center.

Opening the section, Professor Magid introduced the history and the functionality of ROS that was originally developed by a group of scientists from the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 2007.

Based on his own working experience with several versions of ROS in 2012 – 2015 at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Bristol and Innopolis University, Professor Magid briefly described the advantages and disadvantages of the system and possible alternative operating systems for robot programming.

“Security is very important for all of us, especially if we consider the Defense industry of Russia. As far as ROS is an open source operating system, everyone could possibly write a malicious code to enter the system and make critical changes, which is a big issue in military terms. In addition, ROS is a free product and that is why problem solving and bug fixing may take significant time. I suppose it is necessary for Russia to create our own robotic operating system since ROS has some serious issues and requires various improvements. I believe we can do it much better”, - summarized his speech professor Magid.