Thanks everyone for an amazing ROSCon 2012! The inaugural event exceeded our expectations, with over 200 attendees watching excellent, standing-room-only talks on all things ROS. ROS "Godfather", Morgan Quigley, kicked things with a talk that took us from ROS past to future, and the rest of the two-day schedule covered everything from useful core libraries (tf, URDF, Gazebo, openni_kinect, rosjava), to talks on robots using ROS (Robonaut, autonomous lawnmowers, humanoid, field robots), and much, much more. The event also served as an kickoff for the Open Source Robotics Foundation, which will act as a steward for ROS, Gazebo, and future ROSCon events.

Many of you have asked, and, yes, we're working hard now to process the video and post them online.

It took a lot of people to make ROSCon happen, so a special thanks to:

• Our sponsors: Yaskawa, Clearpath Robotics,Heartland Robotics, Willow Garage,Bosch,Yujin Robot, Schunk, CoroWare, Synapticon, and I Heart Engineering. Thanks also to National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) for sponsoring the opening night reception.
• Our organizers: Brian Gerkey, Ryan Gariepy, Matthew Williamson, and Cedric Pradalier.
• Our volunteers: Sarah Elliott, Aaron Blasdel, David Coleman, and Ben Cohen.
• Our speakers, who put together awesome talks.
• Our program committee for choosing the talks.
• Our attendees, without whom there would be no event!

For those that attended, we will be seeking your feedback to make sure that ROSCon 2013 can be even bigger and better.

Here are some of the attendee reactions from Twitter:

At #ROSCon right now. Awesome motion planning talk! twitter.com/asmat/status/2...

— Carlitos (@asmat) May 19, 2012

Just drove a @clearpathrobots Husky with my iPhone in the #ROSCon hack room.Only had to change one line in a launch file.

— Michael Carroll (@carromj) May 20, 2012

Met a lot of very awesome people at #ROSCon the last two days, and learned about some great projects that I'll use at work and for #thesis

— Michael Janssen (@jamuraa) May 20, 2012

Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name #ROSCon #humbled

— David Lu!! (@probablydavid) May 20, 2012

From Hendrik Skubch at the University of Kassel

Dear ROS community,

we are happy to announce three new ROS repositories:

• cn-roscs-ros-pkg http://code.google.com/p/cn-roscs-ros-pkg/

This stack contains a single package: roscs, which provides C# wrappers for ROS. It does not support the complete ROS functionality, but the parts we deemed most important, namely publish / subscribe, service calls, limited support for parameters and some minor functionality. We are using this under Linux with mono, Windows is not tested and will probably not work.

• cn-util-ros-pkg http://code.google.com/p/cn-util-ros-pkg/

This stack contains some useful utility libraries, namely:

• cstf, which wraps some tf methods in C#,
• Castor, a utility library for reading and writing configuration files from C++ and C#,
• udp_proxy_generator - Generates multicast proxies for ros topics. It is a very simple approach to a multi master environment, no namespace or topic remappings are done, messages are simply relayed. Given a configuration file, which specifies topics and message types, C++ code for a proxy is generated and compiled.

• cn-alica-ros-pkg http://code.google.com/p/cn-alica-ros-pkg/

This stack holds ALICA, a framework to coordinate and control multiple robots. It consists of three packages:

• Planmodeller - an Eclipse-based IDE to model multi-robot behaviour.
• AlicaEngine - an execution layer for the designed programs.
• AlicaClient - a simple monitoring GUI.

At its core, ALICA, similar to SMACH, uses hierarchies of state-automata to define behaviour. In contrast to SMACH, it is geared at teams of robots, and features task and role allocation algorithms and coordinated constraint solving and optimisation facilities.

This is part of an ongoing effort to make the source code of the RoboCup Mid-Size Team Carpe Noctem publicly available. All this software is used on our MSL robots. Documentation will be added to the wiki once indexed. This video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhIrhU19PG4 shows the software in action during the Dutch Open 2012 tournament.

Many thanks, Hendrik Skubch Distributed Systems Group University of Kassel Carpe Noctem

From Kyle Maroney at Barrett Technology

ROS Users,

In advance of ICRA 2012 and the first annual ROSCon, Barrett Technology is happy to announce a ROS repository created and maintained by Barrett Technology for control of the WAM Arm and BH8-280 BarrettHand. Barrett Technology's ROS repository is an abstraction of Libbarrett, a real-time controls library written in C++.

We look forward to contributing to the ROS community, as well as supporting current and future customers.

svn: http://web.barrett.com/svn/barrett-ros-pkg

Regards,

From Jon Claassens

Hi All,

For the past few months I've been developing a Python scriptable GUI for ROS that can substitute for RViz, but the main focus was to create something that would allow a developer to rapidly craft a user interface for a nontechnical user. It's still very early days and I'd hazard to call the repository even alpha yet, however anyone interested in having a look can find it at https://github.com/jonclaassens/cri/wiki

Key features are that ROS nodes can submit scripts to the visualizer to associate them with standard rViz markers. Scripts can be made to execute when the marker is interacted with in a number of ways. The menu environment of the visualizer is written entirely in PyQT and interacts with a C++ core through published getter-setter functions and callbacks.

I'll be maturing the program over the next few weeks and adding a few tutorials. Comments/suggestions/criticisms would be appreciated...

Best regards Jon

From Todor Stoyanov of Mobile Robotics and Olfaction Lab at the Center for Applied Autonomous Sensor Systems (AASS) at Örebro University, Sweden

Hi everyone,

We are pleased to announce the release of a new ROS packages source code repository! The repository contains several packages for perception and grasping, developed at the Mobile Robotics and Olfaction Lab at the Center for Applied Autonomous Sensor Systems (AASS) at Örebro University, Sweden. The source code is available at

http://code.google.com/p/oru-ros-pkg/

with some rudimentary documentation at the wiki page. Future releases are going to also include packages for artificial olfaction, so stay tuned! The released packages contain source code for some of our publications, in particular Three-Dimensional Normal Distributions Transform (3D-NDT) pointcloud registration and Independent Contact Regions(ICR) computation for multi-finger grasping.

In case you are going to attend the ICRA 2012 conference, you can get first hand information on several of the packages by attending the corresponding talks:

RGB-D registration: SPME workshop, Mon. 11:20 ICR on noisy real-world data: TuC210.3 3D-NDT registration: ThD06.1 ICR on a patch contact model: ThB02.2

Don't hesitate to contact us with comments or questions about the packages.

-- The AASS MRO team

Announced by Takashi Ogura on ROS-users mailing list

Hi ros-users.

I'm ROS hobby user in Japan.

I start rosruby project (which means ruby ROS client), and now you can try it.

Here is document for install and try some pub/sub, service samples.

https://github.com/OTL/rosruby/wiki/rosruby (I'm testing electirc, ruby 1.8.7 and ubuntu 11.10)

rosruby is not tested fully yet, but it works with simple applications.

I want your precious feedbacks!

Because trunk is not stable, I released current version as v0.1.0. you can also download it from here.

https://github.com/OTL/rosruby/tags

I am not heavy ruby user. Honestly, rosruby is my first ruby application....

Thank you.

Posted on ROS-users mailing list

Hello,

My name is Ganesh P Kumar, and I'm a student at Autonomous System Technologies Research & Integration Laboratory (ASTRIL), at Arizona State University, USA.

This to announce the phspline_trajectory_planner ROS stack, developed by my advisor, Dr. Srikanth Saripalli and myself. This stack extends the navigation_experimental stack to make goal_passer follow a path generated by a certain spline called PH Spline.

Documentation: http://robotics.asu.edu/2012/04/phspline-trajectory-planner/

Repository (hg) : https://bitbucket.org/pkganeshpk/phspline_planner

Could the ROS indexers please take note and let me know?

Regards, Ganesh P Kumar

ROS Fuerte is now officially available!

With each ROS distribution, we've focused on making great robotics libraries work together easily, and with this release we've made many changes under the hood to make it simpler and cleaner for you to integrate your software into the ROS ecosystem.

ROS Fuerte includes major new releases of Gazebo 1.0 and PCL 1.5, and the core ROS libraries have been rewritten to be standalone: you can now easily use ROS messages in non-ROS frameworks. These standalone messages are made possible by a brand new, CMake-based build system and release toolchain that also greatly improve cross-platform and cross-compilation support. Cross-platform support has also been improved by an RViz port to Qt.

ROS aims to make robotics code more reusable, and this release is a strong new foundation for the next generation of great robotics libraries.

Install ROS Fuerte

Please see the ROS Fuerte page for more information on what's new in Fuerte, how to migrate from Electric, and how to download the release.

Thanks to Synapticon and I Heart Engineering for becoming ROSCon 2012 Silver Sponsors! You'll be able to meet representatives from both companies during the event.

Thanks again to our Founding/Platinum sponsors: Clearpath Robotics, Heartland Robotics, Willow Garage, Bosch, and Yaskawa. Thanks also to our Gold Sponsors, Yujin Robot and CoroWare.

ROS Fuerte Release Candidate 3 is now available. This update contains bug fixes to rospack and roscore.

Ubuntu users: If you have a previous install of ROS Fuerte Beta, please use "sudo apt-get update; sudo-apt-get upgrade" to make sure that all packages are properly updated.

Non-Ubuntu users: Installation instructions for the experimental platforms like OS X and Arch are still in progress, so we encourage users of those platforms to help test and contribute.