Recently in events Category

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.

Gary Bradski will give a talk on OpenCV and Radu Bogdan Rusu will give a talk on the Point Cloud Library in the Workshop on Best Practice in 3D Perception and Modeling for Mobile Manipulation.
When: Monday, May 3, 9:00 - 09:30 (OpenCV), 10:00 - 10:30 (PCL). Where: Dena'ina Center, Kahtnu 1.

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.

Paper Presentations

Jürgen Sturm (University of Freiburg) will present "Vision-Based Detection for Learning Articulation Models of Cabinet Doors and Drawers in Household Environments", which details some of the techniques used in the articulation_models package.
When: Tuesday, May 4, 2010, 08:30−08:45. Where: Egan Center Lower Level Room 9/10.

Eitan Marder-Eppstein (Willow Garage) will present "The Office Marathon: Robust Navigation in an Indoor Office Environment", which details the techniques used in the ROS navigation stack. The experimental code is provided here.
When: Tuesday, May 4, 9:15 to 9:30 am. Where: Egan Center Street Level, Room Cook Hall.

Wim Meeussen (Willow Garage) will present "Autonomous Door Opening and Plugging in with a Personal Robot", which is implemented in the pr2_doors stack. The experimental code is provided here.
When: Tuesday, May 4, 2010, 14:50−15:05. Where: Egan Center Lower Level Room 1.

Ellen Klingbeil (Stanford) will present "Autonomous Operation of Novel Elevators for Robot Navigation", which is implemented in the elevator packages in sail-ros-pkg.
When: Tuesday, May 4, 2010, 15:35−15:50. Where: Egan Center Lower Level Room 1.

Jeremy Maitin-Shephard (Berkeley) will present "Cloth Grasp Point Detection Based on Multiple-View Geometric Cues with Application to Robotic Towel Folding", which details the techniques used for the very popular towel-folding video demonstration.
When: Wednesday, May 5, 2010, 09:15−09:30, Where: Egan Center Lower Level Room 13/14.

Ioan Şucan (Rice University) will present "Combining Planning Techniques for Manipulation Using Realtime Perception", which discusses a combined framework for motion planners (OMPL, CHOMP, SBPL) led to the development of the arm_navigation and motion_planners stacks. More information here. When: Wednesday, May 5, 2010, 15:20−15:35. Where: Egan Center Lower Level Room 13/14.

Ben Cohen (Penn) will present "Search-Based Planning for Manipulation with Motion Primitives", which discusses some of the techniques used in the sbpl package. More information here. When: Wednesday, May 5, 2010, 15:35−15:50. Where: Egan Center Lower Level Room 13/14.

Benjamin Pitzer (Bosch RTC) will present "Automatic Reconstruction of Textured 3D Models", which is demonstrated in this video and builds upon packages in bosch-ros-pkg.
When: Thursday, May 6, 2010, 09:45−10:00. Where: Egan Center Lower Level Room 3.

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.