A story over at the New Scientist talk about how roboticists are working on an operating system that can be implemented in many different robots.

This sorry state of affairs is set to change. Roboticists have begun to think about what robots have in common and what aspects of their construction can be standardised, hopefully resulting in a basic operating system everyone can use. This would let roboticists focus their attention on taking the technology forward.

Once a developing industry crosses a threshold regulation for the purposes of standardizing become essential for the industry to gain greater appeal. Thus regulation, even if in this case it would be voluntary, enables an industry to develop by allowing people to specialize in different aspects of that industry.

This desire has its roots in frustration, says Brian Gerkey of the robotics research firm Willow Garage in Menlo Park, California. “People reinvent the wheel over and over and over, doing things that are not at all central to what they’re trying to do.”

Regulation plays the critical role of creating a bare minimum set of standards that those in the industry will aim to meet, but also, creates expectations about what a product will be capable of doing in that industry. These expectations are what enables specialization as developers no longer need to worry about developing process to meet the minimum set of standards as regulation will ensure they have already been met.

What separate industry regulation from state regulation is voluntary versus mandatory. If the industry is ready for regulation than efforts to develop one will bear fruit. If the industry is not ready it will largely be ignored and no harm will be done. However, when the state gets involved, the industry must follow the regulation even if destroys the development of that industry. Take a look at our space program for the last thirty years. It’s development has been severely stunted by the amount of regulation the state has imposed on the industry.

Certainly state regulation is essential to an industry, however, because it’s mandatory it must be sufficiently limited to ensure it does more good than harm to the industry it regulates.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 at 9:38 am and is filed under Regulation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.