Sometimes it feels like the robot revolution is about to explode any day now. How long will it be before you have robot pals and robot slaves? Robots serving you at a beer at a bar, or teaching your cousin in a class? All these things might happen a lot sooner that you might think.

Work is underway on developing a common operating system for robots. The premise makes a great deal of sense. The overwhelming majority of all robots built so far have been constructed for specific purposes. Almost all of them have required new software to be made just for them. 

Developed at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Robot Operating System is an attempt to standardize the basic software requirements of robotics. A sort of base to build all other specialized software on. For example, the Robot Operating System may include programming for movement, facial recognition and object identification. With the base in place, people would be freed from re-writing all this code for each new robot; instead, they can use ROS as a foundation to build more high-level software.

The ROS is specifically be designed for advanced robots that will interact socially with humans.

Perhaps one day robots will be sort of like a PC: you'll be able to buy a base model, and the customize it as you see fit, on the hardware side of things. On the software side of things, you'll be able to download programs, as needed, that suit you. Such as one that cleans your house, walks your dog, or what-have-you.

It'll be interesting to see how it all turns out.

New Scientist made this great video on the subject. There are some slick robots in the flick.