ROS is set up for distributed Open Source development. The system is designed to be built from a federation of repositories, each potentially run by a different organization. We've been happy to see three new ROS package repositories sprout up (besides those already hosted by Stanford, CMU, MIT, and TUM).
bosch-ros-pkg: Bosch has been extending our navigation stack to support frontier-based exploration and they have been contributing patches back to the personalrobots repository. Their wrapper for libgphoto2 has also been getting some use on the ros-users mailing list
gt-ros-pkg: Georgia Tech's Healthcare Robotics Lab has already contributed several packages and the Humanoid Robotics Lab and Socially Intelligent Machines Lab will be participating as well.
wu-ros-pkg: Washington University is also setting up a ROS package repository (which the many Wash-U alumni at Willow Garage are happy to see). Bill Smart's presentation, "Is a Common Middleware for Robotics Possible?" at IROS 2007 helped guide the philosophy and goals of ROS in its earliest stages, especially the focus on making reusable libraries.
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