Open-Source Humanoids

The writers over at the Daily Galaxy blog seem to have a pretty compelling vision of the future of robotics, specifically of the humanoid variation. It would seem that quite a few people consider the DIY (do it yourself) and Open Source are not just a fad, but the wave of the future. It's a future most elegantly fronted by the Willow project who's aim is to bring robotics to the masses. The project makes all their hardware and software designs open source, so anybody with the capability can take part, downloading existing designs and uploading their own. Willow feels that such an approach of putting the hardware and software in the hands of the average man "will enable breakthrough robotics applications, much as PCs and DOS enabled a new set of computing applications two decades ago."

<- The Willow Garage ->

Young Scientists Design Open-Source Program at NASA

From "Wired"

NASA scientists plan to announce a new open-source project this month called CosmosCode -- it's aimed at recruiting volunteers to write code for live space missions. The program was launched quietly last year under NASA's CoLab entrepreneur outreach program, created by scientists from the NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. Members of the CosmosCode group have been meeting in Second Life and will open the program to the public in the coming weeks, organizers said. CosmosCode is indicative of a larger shift at NASA toward openness and transparency -- things for which complex and bureaucratic government labs are not known. The software project is part of CoLab, an effort to invite the public to help NASA scientists with various engineering problems. NASA is also digging into its files from previous missions and releasing code that until now remained behind closed doors. Together, these projects are creating a sort of SourceForge for space. NASA has already released more than 20 open-source software titles, including World Wind, a 3-D virtual globe similar to Google Earth, and Vision Workbench, a framework for computer vision applications. Organizers of CosmosCode will create a wish list of software, which could include applications such as mission-design and flight software.