OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE
Power in the community
Open source software has advanced to a point where it’s now a credible option for industrial imaging, Matthew Dale finds
D
espite having been a research tool for a long time, open source software is now translating into
industry, including in systems using machine vision. So says Christoph Hellmann Santos,
research group leader of software engineering and system integration at Fraunhofer IPA. He is also programme manager of the ROS-Industrial Consortium Europe, an open-source robotics software project that began as a collaborative endeavour between Yaskawa Motoman Robotics, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and Willow Garage to support the use of ROS for manufacturing automation. Te software repository, hosted on GitHub, was founded by SwRI’s Shaun Edwards in 2012. Since then, robot perception through vision capabilities – usually 3D imaging – has become a key part of ROS. Te main advantage and defining
characteristic of open source software is that users have full control over the software stack. ‘It enables you to share your source
code, which, while being very important for research, seems to be against industrial companies’ interests,’ said Hellmann Santos. ‘However, despite this, we are seeing a lot of companies using open source software. Tis is particularly the case in the IT world, where much of today’s IT infrastructure – with the exception of personal computers – is now running on open source software.’ Open source is particularly suited to
research, as it can be very limiting to use proprietary software packages: without having access to the full source code, researchers aren’t able to add changes when looking to implement new features. ‘With open source software, you can manipulate the software stack as much
as you want, which avoids having to do workarounds,’ said Hellmann Santos. ‘Not only is this of interest to research, but also to companies, as they also have circumstances where they’d like to have access to the source code.’ Tis is especially the case when a
company is looking to develop specialised vision software, he explained, as it can be beneficial to have the freedoms granted by open source when making modifications, in addition to being able to benefit from the latest developments made by others in the open source community. It is particularly in the development of imaging solutions that Hellmann Santos
‘If you write open source software well and test it well, then it can easily be as reliable as proprietary software’
sees the most benefit for open source software in machine vision, accessed through libraries such as OpenCV or Point Cloud Library. ‘If they are just looking to use machine
vision technology for an existing application, such as bin picking, then they’d most likely want to use specialised proprietary software, which itself might already use open source libraries internally,’ he explained. ‘However, for creating the control software for a new vision or automation solution, open source could prove advantageous, as it enables any bugs to be addressed in the software directly, without having to approach the company that made the software.’
20 IMAGING AND MACHINE VISION EUROPE APRIL/MAY 2021 Because of this, Hellmann Santos believes
open source software is unlikely to appeal to vision integrators – who tend to work with established system solutions – but rather those developing automation software or vision software for new applications. ‘Tese companies would use open source software in their software solution and provide easy- to-use features such as a user interface, which they could then sell to vision integrators,’ he said. Examples of applications that can be
addressed using new vision or automation solutions, developed using open source, according to Hellmann Santos, include: defect analysis, surface detection and inspection, bin picking and planning a path across a surface for applications such as sanding and painting.
Open, but not free For those considering taking on open source software as part of their business, an important point to note is that it is not free. While it is true that the software itself doesn’t carry a price tag, its use does incur costs. First and foremost, in-house programming competence is required to understand and manipulate the source code. ‘If you use proprietary software, you pay a
company to support the software and solve any problems and bugs that may occur, and you have a high degree of dependency,’ Hellmann Santos said. ‘With open source software you don’t have the same type of support and dependency. What you have is an open source community that can help, but this support is neither guaranteed nor immediately to hand.’ It’s therefore advisable to have an
expert in-house, who can address any issues that occur, or failing that at least be
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