ROSIN stands for quality-assured ROS industrial software components. The background to the project, which was launched on January 1 and is funded by the European Union as part of the "Horizon 2020" research and innovation program, is that open source software is already established in science and should also offer added value for industrial applications in the future. Against this backdrop, the global ROS-Industrial initiative has been working for some time to promote the spread of ROS - the Robot Operating System. In order to consolidate Europe's leading role in production technologies, the ROSIN project now aims to strengthen the EU's role in ROS-Industrial. To this end, the project partners are implementing three main activities: ensuring industry-ready software quality, providing 50% of the project budget for users and developers of business-relevant applications and offering further training for students and industrial partners. Interested individuals or companies can apply to participate in the project.

In order to achieve the project goals, the project partners - in addition to Fraunhofer IPA, these are TU Delft as coordinator, IT University Copenhagen, Aachen University of Applied Sciences, Fundacion Tecnalia Research and Innovation and ABB - are working on two main aspects of the suitability of open source software (OSS) for production technology: Firstly, the software quality must meet industrial requirements. To ensure this, IT University Copenhagen is developing new ways of automatically testing code. This is supplemented by numerous quality assurance measures, which also include new continuous integration tests (so-called model-in-the-loop methods) with ABB robots.

On the other hand, ROSIN wants to further increase interest in OSS on the part of industry and open up investment opportunities. There are already examples of industrial applications with ROS. At the same time, however, applications are closely linked to the issue of code quality and the two can block each other: Improvements in software quality require investment on the part of industry, which in turn only wants to invest once the quality is at a certain level. ROSIN will resolve these dependencies.

Pre-financing of promising developments

In parallel to the quality improvements, new ROS components are to be developed and existing ones further improved. To this end, 50% of the project budget - around EUR 7.5 million in total - is available for collaboration with European users and developers as part of so-called "Focused Technical Projects" (FTPs). At the same time, a further hurdle is to be overcome and the budget optimally utilized: Experience shows that the industry only funds ROS developments once they have been successfully implemented. This is why ROSIN provides up to 30% of the total costs in the FTPs in order to reach the first milestone. The condition for this is that the developers secure further funding. Companies in the EU or certain neighboring countries can apply for cooperation in the project at www.rosin-project.eu if they are interested.