Meet DARwln-OP!!!!!

DARwIn-OP (Dynamic Anthropomorphic Robot with Intelligence - Open Platform) is an affordable, miniature-humanoid-robot platform with advance computational power, sophisticated sensors, high payload capacity, and dynamic motion ability to enable many exciting research, education, and outreach activities. Sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the United States, DARwIn-OP has been developed by RoMeLa at Virginia Tech with collaboration with University of Pennsylvania, Purdue University and Robotis Co., based on the award winning DARwIn series humanoid robots in development since 2004.

DARwIn-OP is a true open platform where users are encouraged to modify it in both hardware and software, and various software implementations are possible (C++, Python, LabVIEW, MATLAB, etc.) The open source hardware is not only user serviceable thanks to its modular design, but also can be fabricated by the user. Publically open CAD files for all of its parts, and instructions manuals for fabrication and assembly are available on-line for free.

A number of DARwIn-OP units will be fabricated and built by Robotis Co. for distribution to 11 partner universities (including major research universities, RUI institutions, a women's college, and two local high schools) and will utilize them in their classroom teaching and projects as well as outreach activities.

The objective of this annual workshop is to; introduce DARwIn-OP to the humanoid robotics community to broaden the DARwIn-OP project and form a user community; train the users for use in research, education, and outreach activities; disseminate results of the usage of DARwIn-OP in the classroom; and to obtain feedback from the users for future improvements.

Robot Operating System (ROS)

Standford University have came up with a classic operating system called ROS. It started in 2007 & now it has reached to the good level of maturity. It has great support of the various hardware platform. It works on Rovio & Neo too as described in  the only drawback is you should have linux distribution (e.g Fedora, Ubuntu etc..) to work on ROS.

As of 2008, development continues primarily at Willow Garage, a robotics research institute/incubator, with more than twenty institutions collaborating in a federated development model.

ROS provides standard operating system services such as hardware abstraction, low-level device control, implementation of commonly-used functionality, message-passing between processes, and package management. It is based on a grapharchitecture where processing takes place in nodes that may receive, post and multiplex sensor, control, state, planning, actuator and other messages. The library is geared toward a Unix-like system (Ubuntu Linux is listed as 'supported' while other variants such as Fedora and Mac OS X are considered 'experimental').

ROS has two basic "sides": The operating system side ros as described above and ros-pkg, a suite of user contributed packages (organized into sets called stacks) that implement functionality such as simultaneous localization and mapping, planning, perception, simulation etc.

ROS is released under the terms of the BSD license, and is open source software. It is free for commercial and research use. The ros-pkg contributed packages are licensed under a variety of open source licenses.

For more details check out Wikipedia page or visit ROS website.