Revision as of 14:01, 16 March 2014

Introduction

This manual was written with the purpose of facilitating the contribution process to ROP. ROP was launched to become a central place for the exchange of robotic hardware designs through embedded wiki pages. Comparable to open source software, companies and research institutions can release their robot hardware design on ROP under an open hardware license. The essence of sharing open-source hardware is sharing the design files, but there are many other hardware design-related files that can decrease the development efforts required to build a robot. Please note that you are not required to post all files discussed below, but the more you contribute, the faster your design will be adopted by the community. The contents of this document are mainly based on a work of the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) on the best practices for sharing open-source hardware.

Elements of a ROP contribution

This section describes some of the files you should consider sharing when publishing your project on ROP.

Summary

The project description should include a brief summary describing the robot's identity and purpose. Furthermore please provide hyperlinks to:

• Author
• License
• Hardware
• Software

The project description should include a clear description of the robot functionality and an overview of the robot layout. A component hierarchy or product breakdown structure is also very beneficial for the comprehensibility of the robot structure, see Figure 1 for an example.