Software is one of the major components of robots; in fact, it
is the main bottleneck for the proliferation of robotics in our
everyday lives. In the last years the field of robotics has been
an emerging application area of the libre (free/open source)
software phenomenon. Libre software tools have been traditionally popular among the robotics research and teaching
community. Even companies whose main business model is
to sell robots have found convenient to share the software in
order to promote a community around their products. In this
paper we analyze the situation of libre software in these three
subareas: industry, teaching and research. In particular, we
describe commercial robots like the Cye and the Pioneer,
a software platform like Orocos as a examples of industrial
world applications, the libre tools around the LEGO Mindstorms in the case of teaching, and the Robocup competition
and the Player/Stage platform in research area. All these
cases show that libre software can act as a catalyst in the
robotics industry which is still a sector in its early research
and industrial stage
