Event Title: ROS-Industrial Basic Developer's Class June 4-6, 2013
Event Description: We are delighted to invite you to attend the ROS-Industrial Basic Developer's Training class, which will be held June 4-6, at Southwest Research Institute, in San Antonio, TX. The class will provide a hands-on introduction to ROS and ROS-Industrial, and it will culminate with hardware integration exercises with live industrial robots and peripherals. The class is FREE to Full/Associate Members of the ROS-Industrial Consortium. Others may attend for a fee. For your convenience, we are also offering for you to purchase the preconfigured small form factor ROS-I PC that you will use during the class. To learn more about the class, please browse to the website: http://rosindustrial.org/ric/events.htm
Please join us this May for the second annual edition of ROSCon!
ROSCon 2013 is a chance for ROS developers of all levels, beginner to expert, to spend an extraordinary weekend learning from and networking with the ROS community. Get tips and tricks from experts and meet and share ideas with fellow developers from around the globe.
ROSCon is a developers' conference, in the model of PyCon and BoostCon. Following the success of the inaugural ROSCon in St. Paul, Minnesota (http://roscon.ros.org/2012), this year's ROSCon will be held in Germany. Similar to last year, the two-day program will comprise technical talks and tutorials that will introduce you to new tools and libraries, as well as teach you more about the ones you already know.
Once again we received an overwhelming number of session proposals, which made for some tough decisions in the review process. The 35 talks in the program include in-depth coverage of core libraries, like Octomap and RQT, multiple perspectives on timely topics like embedded systems and real-time control, and plenty of novel applications of ROS. And we an excellent keynote on MoveIt!, from Sachin Chitta of Willow Garage.
We have some great sponsors to thank: Bosch, Clearpath Robotics, Cyberbotics, Google, I Heart Engineering, Rethink Robotics, Schunk, Yaskawa Motoman, Yujin Robot, and Willow Garage. We're excited to have such strong industry support!
The first meeting of the Consortium will take place on March 6-7th. We will commence with a general information session, open to the public, on the afternoon of March 6. The Consortium Members' Meeting will be held March 7. For more information, please see the Consortium Events page.
ROSCon 2013 is a chance for ROS developers of all levels, beginner to expert, to spend an extraordinary weekend learning from and networking with the ROS community. Get tips and tricks from experts, network, and share ideas with fellow developers from around the globe.
ROSCon is a developers' conference, in the model of PyCon and BoostCon. Following the success of the inaugural ROSCon in St. Paul, Minnesota http://roscon.ros.org/2012 ) this year's ROSCon will be held in Stuttgart, Germany. Similar to last year, the two-day program will com prise technical talks and tutorials that will introduce you to new tools and libraries, as well as teach you more about the ones you already know. The bulk of the program will be 30-40 minute pre sen tations (some may be longer or shorter).
Want to present at ROSCon? Submit a proposal! For details on proposing, go to http://roscon.ros.org/
If you don't want to make a formal presentation, you should still bring your new project or idea to ROSCon!
There will be several sessions of Lightning Talks, which are 5-minute mini-talks that are scheduled just-in-time at the conference. There will also be open space for Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) meetings, impromptu hacking sessions, and informal presentations.
On behalf of the ROSCon 2013 Organizing Committee:
Alexander Bubeck, Fraunhofer IPA
Tully Foote, Willow Garage
Ryan Gariepy, Clearpath Robotics
Brian Gerkey, Open Source Robotics Foundation
Florian Weisshardt, Fraunhofer IPA
Matthew Williamson, Rethink Robotics
ROS Industrial -- An Enabler for Industrial Robotics?
Development of Industrial Applications with ROS -- Experiences
October 17, 2012
The integration of hardware and software components into new
automation applications is still a big challenge regarding interface
adaptations, communication, conduction of components and integration
tests as well as optimization of parameters for the target
scenario. In addition, applications in the automation domain are
often developed from scratch with only limited software reuse.
Using component-based development in combination with reuse of
existing software and hardware components promises a significant
improvement in efficiency for application development.
A prominent example for a widely used component-based framework
is ROS, which focuses on code reuse in robotics research and
development and offers already great variety of mature robotic soft -
ware components (e.g. SLAM, motion planning, 2D/3D perception).
In this conference methods and procedures for the component based
development with ROS are presented that increase the reusability
of existing components. Furthermore, the ROS Industrial
initiative is introduced that matches existing ROS components to
the needs of industrial applications (e.g. quality assurance, robust -
ness, etc.). Concrete examples how ROS is already used in industrial
applications today are given in the conference.
We are looking forward to welcome you at Fraunhofer IPA at our
conference.
OBJECTIVES
In this conference we want to bring together representatives from
academia and industry to exchange experiences on application
development with ROS and clarify the needs of industry with
respect to ROS Industrial. The participants have the opportunity
to get information on the starting initiative of ROS Industrial and
generate and influence the goals, timelines and development
priorities of the community development.
Conference Topics:
Presentation of methods and procedures of component-based
development with ROS
Introduction of the ROS Industrial initiative
Examples of successful technology transfer from academia to
industrial applications
ROS for product development
TARGET AUDIENCE
This conference addresses developers of industrial robotic appli -
cations, system integrators and executive personal of small and
medium-sizeed enterprises as well as R&D division of larger companies
in the field of automation, logistics and production.
We've finished processing footage from ROSCon 2012 and are happy to
announce that videos of all the presentations (including the exciting
Lightning Talks) are now posted and freely available. See the
program for links to the videos.
That's over 11 hours of ROSCon video; enjoy! And thanks again to
everybody who made our inaugural ROSCon a success.
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:
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.
Tully Foote of Willow Garage gave a presentation on "Open Source Robotics for the Home" which covers ROS, TurtleBot, and more. Video of this presentation is now available on fora.tv.
The ROS at ISR event is now over. We had a full amphitheater so I hope we'll be having a bunch of new ROS users very soon!
Once more thank you to everybody who helped and contributed for the presentation, which by the way is now available for download in pdf format at the event webpage. I will also be posting a presentation with notes soon.
Lino Marques, Gonçalo Cabrita, Pedro Sousa and David Portugal are hosting a "ROS Day" at ISR University of Coimbra on February 16th. The afternoon event will introduce ROS to robot robot software developers and algorithm researchers from ISR and DEEC.
We had a great time at the January 26th meeting of the Homebrew Robotics Club, which was held at Google. There were many quick show-and-tell demos of various hobby robots followed by the featured presentation, "ROS for the Rest of Us", given by Patrick Goebel. Patrick is the creator of Pi Robot and maintainer of pi-robot-ros-pkg. Patrick writes regularly about ROS on his website, including a tutorial on visual object tracking using ROS.
There were several ROS-related presentations during the show-and-tell. Tony Pratkanis presented his ROS + Neato platform, Melonee Wise and Tully Foote introduced the "Turtlebot" platform (iRobot Create + Kinect), and James Bowman demoed an Arduino board running a full ROS node.
There should also be several other quick ROS presentations, including a Tony Pratkanis presenting his ROS + Neato platform, and some Willow Garage presentations on ROS + Arduino, and ROS + Create + Kinect.
Sixty-five students spent the first week of November at the very first CoTeSys-ROS School on "Cognition-enabled Mobile Manipulation". These students focused on the challenges of personal robotics, like manipulating items in human environments. These students attended many lectures and also got hands-on experience with the PR2 robot and TUM-Rosie. They learned everything from basic ROS concepts, to navigation, perception, planning and grasping, knowledge processing, and reasoning. By the end of the week, they were able to program a robot to navigate to table, perceive objects on it, infer missing items, fetch the missing items, and bring them to the table -- an impressive feat.
The feedback on this first event was very positive. "Perhaps the most valuable was meeting researchers and other Ph.D students working in research areas closely related to my own, but of course the talks and tutorials themselves were almost as valuable; it would have taken much longer to learn all these things on my own," said one participant.
It's hard to believe, but it has now been three years since we set out to create an open source software platform for the robotics industry. That effort has come to be known as ROS, which initially began as a collaboration between the STAIR project at Stanford and the Personal Robots Program at Willow Garage. Just a few short years later, we're excited to see how many individuals and institutions have joined in this collaboration. ROS (for Robot Operating System) is completely open source (BSD) and is now in use around the world in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. There are robots running on ROS indoors and out, above and below the sea, and even flying overhead.
As we celebrate this occasion, we thought it would be a good time to share the "State of ROS" and talk about what's next.
People often ask how many users are there of ROS. Due to the free nature of ROS, we simply don't know. What we do know is that since the ROS C Turtle release this past August, there have been over 15,000 unique visitors to the ROS C Turtle installation instructions, with over 6,000 unique visitors in October.
ROS has grown very quickly this past year. Below are a few charts showing the growth in the number of public ROS repositories and ROS packages. As large as the ROS community is, you can see that things are just getting started.
Universities Using ROS
Academic contributors are the backbone of the ROS community, providing nearly three-fourths of the public ROS repositories. These contributions are helping to push the bleeding edge of ROS capabilities, and are also expanding ROS to new robot platforms. In the process, they are creating new communities within ROS to collaborate at the hardware, software, and research levels.
These individuals and departments have greatly expanded the range of hardware that can be used with ROS. Thanks to their efforts, you can now use ROS with iRobot Creates (Brown University), Aldebaran Naos (Brown, Uni Freiburg), AscTec quadrotors (CCNY), Barrett arms (MIT), Velodynes (UT Austin/ART), Pioneers (USC, AMOR), Parrot AR.Drones (SIUE), and much, much more.
At the research level, the contributions are too broad to easily summarize. Whether you're doing research in 3D perception, manipulation, cognitive robotics, mapping, motion planning, controls, grasping, SLAM, HRI, or object recognition, there are ROS packages representing current research. We look forward to a world where "academic publication" refers to code as much as it does papers, and, thanks to the ROS community, we are starting to see that happen. We are also building tools to help researchers cite ROS code used in their publications.
What's even more exciting than seeing companies using ROS is organizations contributing open source software to the community. There are ROS repositories for Bosch, Shadow Robot, Aptima, Fraunhofer IPA, Robotino (maintained by REC) and Vanadium Labs. Meka and Skybotix are both providing open-source drivers for their hardware, and Thecorpora's Qbo is billed as an "open-source robot." More broadly, Yujin Robot has released their embedded tools for ROS and REC has ported ROS to Windows.
Companies developing software libraries for robotics have also been supportive of open source and ROS. Gostai completed the transition of the Urbi SDK to open source this year, and the 2.1 release added support for ROS. SRI released components from the Karto SLAM SDK as open source on code.ros.org and is supporting ROS integration.
Programs Using ROS
Various research programs are embracing ROS as a platform. ROS was created, in part, to support the PR2 Beta Program and encourage the exchange of ideas through software. This year, in addition to the official start of the PR2 Beta Program, there have been two DARPA programs announced that are using ROS: Maximum Mobility and Manipulation (M3) and ARM-S. The ARM-S program is providing a shared manipulation platform with ROS drivers that will enable participants to work with the ROS community.
And in Europe, there is the BRICS Project, which aims to identify and promote good development practice and reusable components for robotics. The BRICS participants are making use of many ROS packages, and working to integrate them with other robot software systems.
Building Bridges
One of the values of being open source is that it's much easier to collaborate than compete. With so much great open source software out there, it's wonderful that various robot software frameworks can build on each other's strengths rather than forcing users to choose between them. This year we've seen ROS integrated with OpenRTM, Urbi, and PIXHAWK. There is also improved integration with Orocos.
ROS has also been integrated with other programming languages thanks to members of the community. Tim Niemueller has contributed a Lua client library for ROS, which also helps provide integration with the Fawkes Framework. Brown University has contributed a Javascript library for ROS that lets you control ROS-based robots directly from a Web browser.
We strive to make ROS as open as possible. From ROS's early days hosted on SourceForge, to a community-editable wiki, to open code reviews, we've done our best to perform ROS development out in full view of the public. However, we recognize that we can do more and are pursuing two major efforts to do so.
First, we created a new process for proposing changes to ROS. This process, called ROS Enhancement Proposals (REPS), empowers you to contribute to ROS development. It also provides better insight into current efforts.
Our second effort lays the groundwork for a potential ROS Foundation, an organization for the long-term development of ROS. We are inspired by the Mozilla Foundation, Apache Software Foundation, and GNOME Foundation, which act as stewards for public technologies. These foundations were not created overnight, nor were they created alone. We have already received invaluable advice from our friends at Mozilla on how to get started; now we need your help.
We invite you to get involved -- how can you play a role? We need developers for the core libraries, researchers to push the envelope, and companies to bring it together. As a community, these are all things we already have and are already doing. All we need to do is take the next step together.
This third year for ROS has shown us the size and strength of the ROS community. As our community continues to grow, we hope that we can better combine our strengths to meet the challenge of creating an open platform for robotics.
Concluding Thoughts
Just a few short years ago we set out to create an open software platform that lets roboticists focus on innovation, rather than reinventing the wheel; an open source robot operating system that is free for others to use, change and commercialize upon.
Three years later we are really excited by our community and what it has done. Whether you're talking about robots, libraries, companies, or research labs, the growth and breadth that we have seen has been stunning. We are grateful for your participation and have done our best to respond to your needs by making ROS better and more open. We're looking forward to the next three years (and many years after that), working together to build what's next.
We had a really great time meeting everyone at ICRA and hearing about the various ways in which you are using ROS. We already knew about some of the robots using ROS, but we didn't expect to hear that ROS is already in use on boats and quad-rotor helicopters. There are also a dozen different robots using the ROS navigation stack. Thanks to all of you who took the time to talk with us, participate in tutorials, and show us new uses of ROS.
It was exciting to see open source gaining momentum with commercial robotics companies. Gostai was there to promote the newly open source URBI, SRI was promoting its open-source Karto mapping library, and Robosoft was also promoting its new open source offering with the Kompai robot. There should be a lot more news on the open-source front soon, so stay tuned!
Many of you asked how you can get your open-source repositories added to the ROS.org index. The answer is easy: just send us an e-mail on ros-users. We'd love to hear about what you're doing and we're looking forward to doing more "Robots Using ROS" posts in the future.
ROS will be on display at ICRA 2010. Here are some of the highlights:
Around the Floor
Willow Garage will be demoing various ROS libraries and tools in their booth.
Karto Robotics from SRI will be demoing in the Willow Garage and Gostai booths.
Scheduled Events
Radu Bogdan Rusu and Matei Ciocarlie will give a talk on, "Combining Perception and Manipulation in ROS" as part of the Workshop on Representations for Object Grasping and Manipulation. This will discuss the upcoming point cloud library, pcl, and manipulation stacks which are currently being developed for future versions of ROS. When: Monday May 3, 12:00pm. Where: Dena'ina Center, Tubughnenq' 4.
Care-O-bot 3 and PR2 will participating in the Mobile Manipulation Challenge. Where: Idlughet 3. When: Wednesday May 4th, 14:15 - 15:00 (PR2), Thursday May 5th, 15:00 - 15:45 (Care-O-bot 3).
ROS Tutorial will take place on Friday. This event is full.
Anthony Mallet (LAAS/CNRS) will present "GenoM3: Building Middleware-Independent Robotic Components", which aims to bring greater interoperability among robotics platforms. When: Thursday, May 6, 2010, 15:20−15:35. Where: Egan Center Lower Level Room 6.
