[chrisb]

My knowledge of ROS is a couple of years out of date, but primarily that reproducible testing and simulation, with precise time/clock management, which is essential for a reliable product, was very difficult in ROS.

I also felt the ROS build system more convoluted than necessary; and seemed rather brittle - it was too easy to break it with OS or other updates.

We found that many off-the-shelf ROS nodes didn't do quite what we wanted, and ended up spending much more time than expected rewriting code that we expected we wouldn't need to. It is quicker, and we end up with less & more maintainable code, by writing it ourselves.

I expect this could have been resolved, but when testing ROS we also ended up using more compute resources on-robot than we expected.

Using our own system allows us to build exactly what we require, which has become more important as our system gets larger and more complex; and means integrations into other systems (including testing) are easier.

[pistachiosPower]

You are already the second case in two weeks that have abandoned ROS for industrial purpose(and not university), preferring to build something of their own. I agree that the build system is more complicated than it should be,but I was unaware of the problems related to the resources used by the nodes.

Your comment gave me a lot to think about, thank you.