ROS robotics news

ROS C Turtle Release Candidate 2, ROS 1.2.0

2010-07-28T19:15:32Z

ROS C Turtle Release Candidate 2 has been released, including ROS 1.2.0. All of the remaining stacks have also reached stable release, including geometry and pr2_ethercat_drivers. This bug also fixes a major problem with calibration of the PR2 grippers.

ROS 1.2.0 includes major updates to roscpp, roslaunch, and rosbag, as well as improvements to nearly every tool in the ROS toolchain. roslisp is now included as a supported client library. roslisp users should also install the roslisp_support stack. For a more complete list of changes, see the ROS 1.2.0 change list.

NOTE: Debian packages are currently building and will be available soon. The new debian packages have a "version 23" suffix, e.g. ros-cturtle-ros_1.2.0-23.

ROS 1.2.0
executive_python 0.3.0
geometry 1.2.0
pr2_controllers 1.2.5
pr2_ethercat_drivers 1.2.0
pr2_plugs 0.3.3
pr2_doors 0.3.6
vslam 0.1.5

Change lists

EusLisp now open source

2010-07-26T17:43:12Z

EusLisp is now open source with a BSD license! There are over two decades of robotics research built on top of EusLisp that can now more easily be shared with other researchers. All of this is accessible to ROS users as well: the JSK lab at Tokyo University has developed a roseus package that enables use of ROS within a EusLisp environment. Many robots, including the Kawada HRP-2, Aibo, Nao, and Willow Garage PR2 are compatible with EusLisp.

EusLisp is a Lisp-based programming environment for developing robotics programs. It combines a solid modeler, visualization, geometric libraries, simulation and more into a single development environment. EusLisp was originally developed by Toshihiro Matsui at AIST in 1986 and has been heavily used by the JSK Lab at Tokyo University in their humanoid robotics research.

EusLisp is an integrated programming system for the research on intelligent robots based on Common Lisp and Object-Oriented programming. The principal subjects in the field of robotics research are sensory data processing, visual environment recognition, collision avoiding motion planning, and task planning. In either problem, three dimensional shape models of robots and environment play crucial roles. A motivation to the development of EusLisp was a demand for an extensible solid modeler that can easily be made use of from higher level symbolic processing system. Investigations into traditional solid modelers proved that the vital requirement for their implementation language was the list processing capability to represent and manage topology among model components. Numerical computation power was also important, but locality of geometric computation suggested the provision of vector/matrix functions as built-ins would greatly ease programming.

From EusLisp Manual, Part I, EusLisp Basics, 1. Introduction

You can find out more about the open source Euslisp at EusLisp.sourceforge.net, and you can download the code here.

ROS C Turtle Release Candidate 1

2010-07-25T04:06:55Z

ROS C Turtle Release Candidate 1 has been released. With this release, nearly all of the remaining ROS stacks have reached stable release: camera_drivers, common, common_msgs, driver_common, imu_drivers, joystick_drivers, laser_drivers, pr2_simulator, sound_drivers, visualization, visualization_common. This release also includes ROS 1.1.16, which is a minor update and is the release candidate for ROS 1.2.

As this is our release candidate for C Turtle, we encourage users to try this release out and note any issues they have with this release. You can consult our release notes that we are currently assembling to assist with any integration issues.

NOTE: Debian packages are currently building and will be available soon. The new debian packages have a "version 21" suffix, e.g. ros-cturtle-ros_1.1.16-21.

Change lists

Videre stereo camera driver from ua-ros-pkg

2010-07-23T22:33:35Z

Anton Rebguns of the University of Arizona has announced the release of a Videre Stereo Camera driver. NOTE: this package only works with ROS C Turtle. The announcement is below.

I'd like to announce an initial release of a driver for Videre Stereo cameras. The driver supports both STOC and non-STOC devices. Pretty much all settings can be controlled through the dynamic_reconfigure GUI, these include:

TF Frame
Processing Mode (for STOC devices)
Generic camera parameters (exposure, gain, brightness)
Stereo Processing parameters (uniqueness, texture thresholds, speckle size and range)

There are a few parameters that are present but don't currently work, like whitebalance and horopter settings. There are no tutorials yet, if people are using it and have problems just shoot me an email. I will be adding some documentation/tutorials fairly soon.

Download location (ua-ros-pkg): ua_drivers stack, videre_stereo_cam package.
Wiki page

Thanks, Anton

ROS C Turtle Alpha 6 Released

2010-07-23T01:25:41Z

ROS C Turtle Alpha 6 has been released. This update includes ROS 1.1.15. Many new stacks reached stable release: image_common, image_pipeline, physics_ode, pr2_common, simulator_gazebo, and simulator_stage. We are getting close to our release candidate for the actual C Turtle release. As we approach this release candidate, we anticipate more rapid releases to quickly verify final code changes going into the system.

In addition to the new stable releases, several new unstable/research stacks are being included with this release, including vslam, slam_karto and graph_mapping.

NOTE: Debian packages are still building and will be available soon. The new debian packages have a "version 18" suffix, e.g. ros-cturtle-ros_1.1.15-18.

ROS 1.1.15
common 1.1.11
common_msgs 1.1.5
graph_mapping 0.1.0
image_common 1.2.0
image_pipeline 1.2.0
robot_model 1.2.2
physics_ode 1.2.0
pr2_mechanism 1.2.0
pr2_common 1.2.0
pr2_common_actions 0.3.0
pr2_controllers 1.2.4
pr2_doors 0.3.5
pr2_ethercat_drivers 1.1.6
pr2_mechanism 1.2.1
pr2_plugs 0.3.2
pr2_robot 1.0.2
robot_calibration 0.3.0
simulator_gazebo 1.2.0
simulator_stage 1.2.0
slam_gmapping 1.2.0
slam_karto 0.1.0
vision_opencv 1.0.4
vslam 0.1.4

Change lists

Robots Using ROS: Shadow Robot Dextrous Hand

2010-07-22T17:42:59Z

You can now use Shadow Robot hardware with ROS! Engineers at Shadow Robot have been busy building a ROS stack and have now reached their first release. This initial release includes an interface to both simulated and real hardware, which means that, whether or not you have a Shadow Dextrous Hand of your own, you can use your ROS software to see the Shadow hand move inside of ROS tools like rviz.

To get started, you should check the Shadow Robot ROS FAQ or checkout the Launchpad site.

Urbi Open Source now integrated with ROS

2010-07-22T17:21:34Z

Thanks to the efforts of Gostai, Urbi and ROS are now compatible! Urbi 2.1 has just been released, and this new release includes integration with ROS and Urbiscript.

For ROS users, Urbiscript provides users a powerful scripting environment that provides features like parallelism and event-triggers for creating behavior scripts for your robots. ROS users can also use the Gostai Studio Suite, which provides a graphical IDE. Gostai has released the Urbi kernel as open source (AGPL), which contributes the growing community of open-source platform technologies for robotics.

For Urbi users, ROS provides a quickly growing library of reusable and open-source software components with a wide range of capabilities, including navigation, perception, and manipulation.

To find out more about Urbi open source, check out Urbi Forge. To get started with Urbi + ROS, you can read the Urbi manual or try their Urbi + ROS tutorial.

New College Dataset parser for ROS

2010-07-19T20:59:21Z

Ivan Dryanovski of the CCNY Robotics Lab has announced a New College Data parser for ROS. The announcement is below.

Dear ROS community,

As you may know, the New College Data is a freely available dataset collected from a robot completing several loops outdoors around the New College campus in Oxford. The data includes odometry, laser scan, and visual information.

We have recently released a ROS parser for the New College Dataset. The parser reads in the .alog data files provided on the NCD website and broadcasts ROS messages in real time. The parser also broadcasts transforms between the robot's base frame and the sensor frames, as defined in the NCD paper.

Details about the package, as well as a demo video of the NCD data being played back in rviz, are available here:

http://www.ros.org/wiki/ncd_parser

We hope you find this useful.

Ivan Dryanovski
CCNY Robotics Lab
The City College of New York

New ROS repositories: dfki-sks-ros-pkg, isr-uc-ros-pkg

2010-07-19T20:39:36Z

DKFI Safe and Secure Cognitive Systems at the University of Bremen in Germany has created the dfki-sks-ros-pkg repository, which is open source with a BSD license. They are currently providing a driver for the Leuze rotoScan ROD-4 laser rangefinder.

Institute of Systems and Robotics at the University of Coimbra in Portugal has created the isr-uc-ros-pkg repository, which has a collection of packages with a BSD license. In addition to support for the iRobot Rooma, they have contributed a wifi_discovery_node. The wifi_discovery_node uses the experimental foreign_relay package to enable multi-robot communication over wireless. This node is available as a separate download, or you can checkout the entire repository.

ROS C Turtle Alpha 5 Released

2010-07-12T23:06:10Z

ROS C Turtle Alpha 5 has been released. This update is mainly to fix an issue with rxgraph and includes ROS 1.1.14. We are also now including ros_tutorials with the base distribution of C Turtle to simplify installation, and we are also testing builds of several new research stacks, including people, sql_database, object_manipulation, pr2_object_manipulation, tabletop_object_perception, pr2_tabletop_manipulation_apps. These research stacks are unstable and must be installed separately.

NOTE: Debian packages are still building and will be available soon. The new debian packages have a "version 15" suffix, e.g. ros-cturtle-ros_1.1.14-15.

Change lists

ROS C Turtle Alpha 4 Released

2010-07-09T17:43:22Z

ROS C Turtle Alpha 4 has been released. This update contains ROS 1.1.13, which contains important bug fixes for roscpp as well as for the relay node in topic_tools.

Two stacks have reached stable status with this release: navigation and diagnostics. They now have 1.2.x version numbers to indicate that they are now part of a stable update series (patch-only).

NOTE: The new debian packages have a "version 12" suffix, e.g. ros-cturtle-ros_1.1.13-12.

ros 1.1.13
common 1.1.9
diagnostics 1.2.0
navigation 1.2.0
pr2_apps 0.2.3
pr2_common_actions 0.2.2
pr2_mechanism 1.1.3
pr2_simulator 1.1.2
robot_model 1.2.1
ros_realtime 0.4.1
simulator_gazebo 1.1.10
visualization 1.1.2
visualization_common 1.1.2

Change lists

ROS C Turtle Alpha 3 Released

2010-07-01T23:04:47Z

C Turtle Alpha 3 has been released. This update includes numerous bug fixes, including a new ROS 1.1.12 release. This release also contains stable releases for robot_model and pr2_robot. If you are running a previous C Turtle release, we encourage you to update and report any issues that you find.

NOTE: The new debian packages have a "version 11" suffix, e.g. ros-cturtle-ros_1.1.12-11. We are currently having issues with Karmic 64-bit binaries, but other Ubuntu binaries should be available.

Change lists

ROS C Turtle Alpha 2 Released

2010-06-18T15:04:22Z

C Turtle Alpha 2 has been released. This update includes numerous bug fixes, including a new ROS 1.1.10 release. This updates fixes bug reports with Gazebo permissions issues, ros::Time issues, tf, Lucid 32-bit binary packages, and more. We appreciate the efforts of the community to make C Turtle as stable as possible -- please keep those reports coming!

NOTE: The new debian packages have a "version 8" suffix, e.g. ros-cturtle-ros_1.1.10-8. They should finish building shortly.

ROS 1.1.10
camera_drivers 1.1.2
geometry 1.1.6
pr2_robot 1.0.0
pr2_common 1.1.0
pr2_power_drivers 1.0.6
ros_realtime 0.3.1
simulator_gazebo 1.1.7

Box Turtle updates:

Change lists

ROS C Turtle Alpha 1 Released

2010-06-11T19:52:23Z

ROS C Turtle Alpha 1 is now available for developers. The is an alpha release of the upcoming distribution that is being used to test the integration of the many new features and components that will be released with C Turtle. C Turtle is intended to be backwards compatible with Box Turtle, though many APIs that were deprecated in Box Turtle have been removed. This early release will allow developers to test compatibility.

Debian packages are available for this release, including binary builds for Ubuntu Lucid Lynx. Any of the current ROS installation instructions will work for C Turtle by simply substitution "cturtle" for "boxturtle". You can also use the SVN externals URLs that we have setup for each variant.

As this is an alpha release, we ask that developers who use it provide as much feedback as possible, including filing bug tickets for any issues found.

Freiburg's "nao" stack 0.2 released

2010-06-09T16:10:37Z

Armin Hornung from Albert-Ludwigs-Universität has announced version 0.2 of the nao stack:

Version 0.2 of Freiburg's "nao" stack for Aldebaran's Nao humanoid has just been released. Major changes are the compatibility with NaoQI version 1.6 and the new omnidirectional walking engine (detailed changelist: http://www.ros.org/wiki/nao/ChangeList ).

Files are available packaged at:
http://code.google.com/p/alufr-ros-pkg/downloads/list

or via source checkout from Freiburg's ROS repository:
http://alufr-ros-pkg.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/nao/

The stack documentation at http://www.ros.org/wiki/nao was extended and adjusted to this new version.

I'm open for feedback and suggestions!

Cheers,
Armin