On the heels of the recent announcement that Rethink’s Baxter was built on ROS, we heard today from our friends at Toyota that their new robot is also running ROS!

Toyota’s Human Support Robot, or HSR, will provide assistance to older adults and people with disabilities. A one-armed mobile robot with a telescoping spine, the HSR is designed to operate in indoor environments around people. It can reach the floor, tabletops, and high counters, allowing it to do things like retrieve a dropped object or put something away in its rightful place. An exemplar of the next generation of robot manipulators, the arm is low-power and slow-moving, reducing the chance of accident or injury as it interacts with people.

And it runs ROS. Dr. Yasuhiro Ota, Manager of the Toyota Partner Robot Program, tells us that the HSR runs ROS Fuerte and uses a number of ROS packages, including:
roscpp,
rospy,
rviz,
tf,
std_msgs,
pcl,
opencv.
As for why they chose to use ROS, Dr. Ota says, “ROS provides an excellent software developmental environment for robot system integration, and it is also comprised of a number of useful ready-to-use functions.”