September 2018 Archives

Looking foward to ROSCon 2018 we're highlighting presentations from last year.

Justin presents a new approach to building web interfaces for ROS applications.

Video

Abstract

This talk will introduce a set of web components, built on top of Robot Web Tools, that make it easy to build complex, ROS-integrated web applications without writing much code. Using the Polymer library with these components helps to make applications that are accessible and mobile-friendly. We will show how to use these components and show some common web programming patterns. Additionally, we will showcase some complex web applications we have developed with these tools, including a programming by demonstration interface, a web-based version of RViz, and a ROS graph explorer utility.

Slides

View the slides here

The first officially licensed local ROSCon event, ROSCon JP 2018, was held in Tokyo, Japan on the 14th of September. ROSCon JP 2018 was held in conjunction with the Open Source Robotics Foundation.

189 people participated on the day (excluding sponsors' invitations and staff). The livestream had a steady 60 to 70 people watching at any one time throughout the day. Thanks to all the participants, ROSCon JP was an exciting day for all. Presentation slides and videos will be published on the website in a few weeks.

The invited talks from Brian Gerkey (Open Robotics) and Nicholas Yeo (ROS-Industrial Asia Pacific), 14 submitted talks, 13 lightning talks, 26 exhibitors' booths, and everything else about the conference was of high quality. Topics of presentation included

• a presentation from Panasonic comparing navigation using the navstack with using commercial navigation system for hospital delivery robots;

• the use of ROS in space robotics by JAXA;

• the application of ROS and Gazebo to a marine robotics challenge (which finished with a surge in donations to the presenters' crowdfunding page to help them attend the next challenge); and

• a discussion of how Sony applied ROS to the development of the newest Aibo. (Find out more at ROSCon 2018 in Madrid)

A catered lunch and reception and a popular exhibitors' hall provided many opportunities for participants to mix with each other and make new connections.

Sponsors

ROSCon JP 2018 was sponsored by the following companies and organisations:

Platinum: Sony

Gold: Renesas, Seqsense, Tier IV, iSiD, Analog Devices, TIS, SICK

Silver: eSOL, GROOVE X, EAMS Lab

Bronze: Honda Research Institute Japan, RT Corporation, Mamezou, INTEC, Robotis, Z Robotix

Friendship: Tokyo Opensource Robotics Kyokai Association

As our first event, we consider ROSCon JP 2018 to have been a massive success and a credit to the Japanese ROS user community.

Looking foward to ROSCon 2018 we're highlighting presentations from last year.

Chris presents a new approach for integrating ROS using Node.js as an alternative to the rosbridge suite.

Video

Abstract

For years, the RosBridge suite (and it's corresponding javascript library roslibjs) have been the most practical way to integrate ROS and javascript. While this combination works fairly well in light-weight applications or as a prototype solution for pumping ROS topics into a web page, it starts to break down as the demands on the system increase. With the rise in popularity of backend javascript engines, particularly Node.js, relying on RosBridge to connect ROS and javascript code becomes a bottleneck in industrial applications with serious performance requirements. New web technologies (like Electron) also make the prospect of integrating a native ROS client library in Node.js more appealing.

Slides

View the slides here

Looking foward to ROSCon 2018 we're highlighting presentations from last year.

Michael presents on how to bring ROS into safety critical systems.

Video

Abstract

This presentation gives an overview about our "Kontrol" development environment for safety critical controllers using ROS and Gazebo. We first analyze existing standards for safety critical controllers for different applications and present the results of an extensive industry survey which concludes that 70-80% of the development costs are spent during the serial development phase. To overcome this burden, we present our approach of a model-based development environment which significantly reduces this cost. We show how ROS and Gazebo can be integrated into one development tool. Finally, we demonstrate the automatic code generation for ROS and ROS2 nodes using Scilab.

Slides

View the slides here

Looking foward to ROSCon 2018 we're highlighting presentations from last year.

Ingo presented how determinism can effect a robotic system. The talk provides an overview of causes of non-determinism. Followed by specific examples of diagnosing determinism in a robotic system and the benefits of eliminating the sources of non-determinism.

Video

Abstract

ROS's foundational style, the asynchronous, loosely coupled compute graph, is great for re-use and distribution, but there's a catch: Nothing guarantees execution ordering. This means, the order in which callbacks and timers are executed can change even when inputs are the same. In many important cases, this leads to different results, and - subtly or not so subtly - changes the robot's behavior. As an example, in the common movebase node, we found reaction times changing between 50 and 200ms, while pure computation time was only 20ms. I will show why this happens, and how to address it, both in the movebase and in general.

Slides

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Looking foward to ROSCon 2018 we're highlighting presentations from last year.

Martin and Sergio present an overview of TRADR as well as ROS packages and tools they've developed in the course of the project. Most of the tools have been released as open source packages. And at the end they present some real world use cases where their robots were helpful.

Video

Abstract

Search and Rescue Robotics is an extremely challenging and broad area of robotics that has recently been experiencing enormous progress. In the last 3 years, the EU project TRADR investigated many aspects of the aforementioned field. With this talk, we would like to share with the ROS community the experience acquired in the development of our system based on advanced use of ROS, in testing and using various hardware, and in dealing with end-users that compose the human-robot teams during search and rescue missions.

Slides

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Looking foward to ROSCon 2018 we're highlighting presentations from last year.

Darby presents the OpenManipulator and easy way to get into manipulation.

Video

Abstract

This announcement will talk about an OpenManipulator, one of TurtleBot3 Friends. The previous TurtleBot series was able to perform the manipulation function through 'TurtleBot Arm'. In TurtleBot3, the function will be 'OpenManipulator'. ROS-enabled OpenManipulator is a full open robot platform consisting of OpenSoftware, OpenHardware and OpenCR(Embedded board). It is expected that ROS users will be able to upgrade TurtleBot3 with ease. Our goal is to support most of the functionality we need as a service, academic, research and educational robot platform through TurtleBot 3 and OpenManipulator.

Slides

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Looking foward to ROSCon 2018 we're highlighting presentations from last year.

Marco introduces the easy_hadeye package using motivation from his groups research using multiple systems.

Video

Abstract

Hand-Eye calibration is a "necessary evil" for enabling the interaction between a robot and its environment, including humans. Determining the precise geometric transformation between the coordinate systems of the robot and the utilized camera(s) is as annoying as it is important in order to avoid errors of multiple centimeters already at a meter distance. easy handeye is a new ROS package that aims at facilitating the computation and management of Hand-Eye calibration, while keeping the library completely generic with respect to hardware and encouraging the user to employ best practices known to date.

Slides

View the slides here