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Announcement from Trevor Jay of Brown's RLAB

Brown is pleased to announce our beta version of rosjs, a light-weight Javascript binding for ROS.

rosjs is designed to enable users and developers to use the functionality of ROS through standard web browsers. Applications developers can leverage all of the power of HTML to build engaging applications and interfaces for robots as quickly as possible without recompiling ROS nodes. Additionally, users can access and run ROS-based applications from standard browsers without the need for any plugins.

rosjs consists of a server and a pure Javascript library. rosjs is not tied to any particular web-server or framework; it even works when served locally. Using websockets, latency is low enough for teleoperation or closed loop control. For example, the following video shows a user teleoperating the PR2 via rosjs from Providence to Palo Alto:

rosjs is currently available for download from the brown-ros-pkg repository via:

svn co https://brown-ros-pkg.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/experimental/rosjs rosjs

and you can view preliminary documentation here:

http://code.google.com/p/brown-ros-pkg/wiki/rosjs

We are making rosjs available now for the ROS community to use and provide feedback. Please play, create, and break stuff; then tell us about it.

Thanks again to the kind people at Bosch and Willow for use of their PR2.

_Robot Learning and Autonomy @ Brown (RLAB)

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.

announcement from the CCNY Robotics lab on ros-users

Dear ROS community,

The Robotics Lab at the City College of New York is releasing a collection of ROS tools that we are developing for our research. The packages, which are BoxTurtle-compatible, are grouped in the ccny-ros-pkg stack. Documentation is available on the ROS wiki.

We have made an effort to include a screenshot and youtube video demonstrating the usage of each single package on the corresponding wiki page. The packages also come with a pre-recorded bag and demo launch files, allowing developers to quickly test and get started with using the tools.

The current collection of packages includes:

• gpsd_viewer: a map viewer for GPS position data provided by gpsd_client.
• artoolkit - a meta-package which downloads and installs ARToolkit locally.
• ar_pose - an ROS wrapper for ARToolkit, capable of tracking the position of single or multiple AR markers relative to the camera, broadcasting the corresponding transforms, as well as publishing visualization markers to rviz.
• laser_scan_splitter - a tool which takes a LaserScan message as input and splits it into an arbitrary number of segments.
• laser_ortho_projector - a tool which takes a LaserScan, as well as a position of the laser in a fixed frame, and outputs the orthogonal projection of the scan, invariant to the roll-, pitch- and z- position of the laser.
• point_cloud_filter - a threshold filter for PointCloud messages, which filters points based on values from any of the cloud's additional channels, such as "confidence" or "intensity"

Additional tools scheduled for release this summer include a driver for the AscTec Autopilot for use with AscTec quadrotor UAVs. We are looking forward to hearing back from you with comments and suggestions on how to improve our software.

William Morris,
Ivan Dryanovski,
Gautier Dumonteil

Brown is pleased to announce the first of a series of summer software releases, beginning with a new BoxTurtle-compatible release of the Brown ROS Pkg.

As usual, the full details are available at:

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

Highlights include:

• the aforementioned BoxTurtle compatibility
• probe has become gscam, and is now compatible with the ROS camera interface, this means any camera or image source available to gstreamer can now be a calibrated part of an image_proc pipeline
• a new node, ar_recog, exposing most of the functionality of ARToolKit through ROS messages
• pr2_keyboard_teleoperator, providing full teleoperation of the PR2 from the keyboard
• position_tracker, a simple odometry correction service

Please check it out and help us make improvements, and be on the look-out for more releases in the coming weeks, including: an ARTag odometry system, an improved NAO v1.6 compatible version of our NAO drivers, and more.

_Trevor

The Media and Machines Lab at Washington University in St. Louis has integrated several of their robots with ROS, including an iRobot B21r and several Videre ERRATICs. They are also maintaining wu-ros-pkg, which is a repository of research projects, drivers, and utilities related to these robots.

Wash U.'s B21r, known as Lewis, is best known for being a mobile robot photographer. Lewis is currently being used for HRI research, and they are also reimplementing the photographer functionality in ROS. Lewis is fully integrated with ROS, including sensor data from 48 sonar sensors, 56 bump sensors, 2 webcams, and a Hokuyo laser rangerfinder. There is also Directed Perception PTU-46 pan-tilt unit that they have mounted the webcams on (driver).

The B21r community will be happy to know that Wash U. has deeply integrated this platform with ROS. They have created an urdf model, complete with meshes for visualizing in rviz, and they have also integrated the B21r with the ROS navigation stack. They are also providing an rwi stack, which includes their rflex driver. The rflex driver is capable of driving other iRobot/RWI robot platforms, including the B18, ATRV, and Magellan Pro.

Wash U. has also integrated their four Videre ERRATICs with ROS. They've named these robots Blood, Sweat, Toil, and Tears, and have equipped them with Hokuyo laser rangerfinders and webcams. The ERRATICs enable them to explore research in multi-robot coordination and control. They're also developing on iRobot Creates using drivers from brown-ros-pkg.

The research at the Media and Machines Lab has led to several interfaces and visualizations for using robots. This includes RIDE (Robot Interactive Display Environment), which takes cues from Real Time Strategy (RTS) video games to provide an interface for easily controlling multiple robots simultaneously. They have also developed a visualization for mapping sensor data over time for search tasks and a 3D interface for binocular robots. RIDE is available in the ride stack, and much of their other research will soon be released in wu-ros-pkg.

The 11 recipients for the PR2 Beta Program have been announced! You can read the announcement on willowgarage.com.

While the program will leverage the common hardware platform of the PR2, it is also a big benefit to the broader ROS community as a whole. All of the participants will be releasing work as open source, and much of this work will be immediately applicable to other robot platforms. For example:

• KU Leuven will be working on improving integration between ROS and Orocos, as well as integrating ROS with other open-source libraries like Blender.
• JSK will be working on integrating ROS, OpenRAVE, and EusLisp.
• Bosch will be providing sensors like accelerometers, gyros, pressure sensors, and skins to participants, which will hopefully lead to new approaches and libraries for these types of sensors.

These are just a few examples, and you can read the announcement for more. There will be numerous libraries in perception, mapping, planning, manipulation, and more that we hope the ROS community will be able to build upon.

Many of the participating institutions have already started ROS repositories, including:

• alufr-ros-pkg
• bosch-ros-pkg
• gt-ros-pkg
• kul-ros-pkg
• lis-ros-pkg
• mod-ros-pkg
• sail-ros-pkg
• tum-ros-pkg
• usc-ros-pkg

These repositories and more will be very active over the next two years, and we encourage the greater ROS community to take part by using the many open-source libraries for ROS in exciting new applications for robotics.

The ROS community has grown an amazing amount this year. As the Robots Using ROS has illustrated, there are all types of robots using ROS, from mobile manipulators, to autonomous cars, to small humanoids. As the types of robots has increased, so too has the variety of software you can use with ROS, whether it be hardware drivers, libraries like exploration, or even code for research papers. This diversity has allowed all types of developers, including researchers, software engineers, and students, to participate in this growing community.

Today we officially crossed the 1000 ROS package milestone. This is due in no small part to the many new ROS repositories that have come online this year. We are now tracking 25 separate ROS repositories that are providing open source code, including repositories from:

• CU Boulder
• UT Austin/Austin Robot Technology
• Albert-Ludwigs-Universität in Freiburg
• University of Arizona
• Georgia Tech
• Bosch
• University of Maryland
• Care-O-bot
• Brown University
• Technische Universität München
• Stanford AI Lab
• Willow Garage
• Washington University in St. Louis
• I Heart Robotics
• Carnegie Mellon University
• MIT LIS
• WPI
• ModLab at Penn
• USC
• Columbia University
• KU Leuven
• Cornell
• Tully Foote (personal)
• Andrew Harris (personal)

We're excited to see the expansion of such an amazing and vibrant ROS community. Thank you all for taking part.

The Intelligent Autonomous Systems Group at TU München (TUM) built TUM-Rosie with the goal of developing a robotics system with a high-degree of cognition. This goal is driving research in 3D perception, cognitive control, knowledge processing, and highlevel planning. TUM is building their research on TUM-Rosie using ROS and has setup the open-source tum-ros-pkg repository to share their research, libraries, and hardware drivers. TUM has already released a variety of ROS packages and is in the process of releasing more.

TUM-Rosie is a mobile manipulator built on a Kuka mecanum-wheeled omnidrive base, with two Kuka LWR-4 arms and DLR-HIT hands. It has a variety of sensors for accomplishing perception tasks, including a SwissRanger 4000, FLIR thermal camera, Videre stereo camera, SVS-VISTEK eco274 RGB cameras, a tilting "2.5D" Hokuyo UTM-30LX lidar, and both front and rear Hokuyo URG-04LX lidars.

One of the new libraries that TUM is developing is the cloud_algos package for 3D perception of point cloud data. cloud_algos is being designed as an extension of the pcl (Point Cloud Library) package. The cloud_algos package consists of a set of point-cloud-processing algorithms, such as a rotational object estimator. The rotational object estimator enables a robot to create models for objects like pitchers and boxes from incomplete point cloud data. TUM has already released several packages for semantic mapping and cognitive perception.

TUM is also working on systems that combine knowledge reasoning with perception. The K-COPMAN (Knowledge-enabled Cognitive Perception for Manipulation) system in the knowledge stack generates symbolic representations of perceived objects. This symbolic representation allows a robot to make inferences about what is seen, like what items are missing from a breakfast table.

In the field of knowledge processing and reasoning for personal robots, TUM developed the KnowRob system that can provide:

• spatial knowledge about the world, e.g. the positions of obstacles
• ontological knowledge about objects, their types, relations, and properties
• common-sense knowledge, for instance, that objects inside a cupboard are not visible from outside unless the door is open
• knowledge about the functions of objects like the main task a tool serves for or the sequence of actions required to operate a dishwasher

KnowRob is part of the tum-ros-pkg repository, and there is a wiki with documentation and tutorials.

At the high level, TUM is working on CRAM (Cognitive Robot Abstraction Machine), which provides a language for programming cognitive control systems. The goal of CRAM is to allow autonomous robots to infer decisions, rather than just having pre-programmed decisions. Practically, the approach will enable tackling of the complete pick-and-place housework cycle, which includes setting the table, cleaning the table as well as loading the dishwasher, unloading it and returning the items to their storage locations. CRAM features showcased in this scenario include the probabilistic inference of what items should be placed where on the table, what items are missing, where items can be found, which items can and need to be cleaned in the dishwasher, etc. As robots become more capable, it will be much more difficult to explicitly program all of their decisions in advance, and the TUM researchers hope that CRAM will help drive AI-based robotics.

Researchers at TUM have also made a variety of contributions to the core ROS system, including many features for the roslisp client library. They are also maintaining research datasets for the community, including a kitchen dataset and a semantic database of 3d objects, and they have contributed to a variety of other open-source robotics systems, like YARP and Player/Stage.

Research on the TUM-Rosie robot has been enabled by the Cluster of Excellence CoTeSys (Cognition for Technical Systems). For more information:

• TUM-Rosie hardware and software description
• IAS Video Channel
• tum-ros-pkg on ROS.org
• Datasets
• Overview Article: Towards Performing Everyday Manipulation Activities
• Overview Article: Towards Automated Models of Activities of Daily Life
• Overview Article: Generality and Legibility in Mobile Manipulation

The Modlab at Penn designed the CKBot (Connector Kinetic roBot) module to be fast, small, and inexpensive. These qualities enable it to be used to explore the promise of modular robotics systems, including adaptability, reconfigurability, and fault tolerance. They've researched dynamic rolling gaits, which use a loop configuration to achieve speeds of up to 1.6/ms, as well as bouncing gaits by attaching passive legs. They are also using the CKBots to research the difficult problem of configuration recognition, and, for the Terminator 2 fans, they have even demonstrated "Self re-Assembly after Explosion" (SAE).

More recently, Modlab has developed ROS packages that can be used when the CKBots are connected to a separate ROS system. They have also created an open source repository, modlab-ros-pkg, for CKBot ROS users. The CKBot modules only have a few PIC processors -- not enough to run ROS -- so an off-board system enables them to use algorithms that require more processing power. In one experiment, they used a camera to locate AR tags on the CKBot modules. The locations were stored in tf, which was used to calculate coordinate transforms between modules. They have also used rviz to display the estimated position of modules during SAE when AR tags were not in use.

One of the projects Modlab is currently working on is a "mini-PR2" made out of CKBot modules. The mini-PR2 will be kinematically similar to the Willow Garage PR2 and is powered by a separate laptop. You can see an early prototype of mini-PR2 opening an Odwalla fridge:

CKbots trace their ancestry back to Professor Mark Yim's work on the PolyBot system at PARC. The PolyBot system had an impressive range of demonstrations, including fence and stair climbing, tricycle riding, and even transforming from a loop, to a snake, to a spider.

Modlab does a variety of other modular robotics research, and has even demonstrated a quick-change end effector for the PR2.

Bosch's Research and Technology Center (RTC) has a Segway-RMP based robot that they have been using with ROS for the past year to do exploration, 3D mapping, and telepresence research. They recently released version 0.1 of their exploration stack in the bosch-ros-pkg repository, which integrates with the ROS navigation stack to provide 2D-exploration capabilities. You can use the bosch_demos stack to try this capability in simulation.

The RTC robot uses:

• 1 Mac Mini
• 2 SICK scanners
• 1 Nikon D90
• 1 SCHUNK/Amtec Powercube pan-tilt unit
• 1 touch screen monitor
• 1 Logitech webcam
• 1 Bosch gyro
• 1 Bosch 3-axis acceleromoter

Like most research robots, it's frequently reconfigured: they added an additional Mac mini, Flea camera, and Videre stereo camera for some recent work with visual localization.

Bosch RTC has been releasing drivers and libraries in the bosch-ros-pkg repository. They will be presenting their approach for mapping and texture reconstruction at ICRA 2010 and hope to release the code for that as well. This approach constructs a 3D environment using the laser data, fits a surface to the resulting model, and then maps camera data onto the surfaces.

Researchers at Bosch RTC were early contributors to ROS, which is remarkable as bosch-ros-pkg is the first time Bosch has ever contributed to an open source project. They have also been involved with the ros-pkg repository to improve the SLAM capabilities that are included with ROS Box Turtle, and they have been providing improvements to a visual odometry library that is currently in the works.

The Healthcare Robotics Lab focuses on robotic manipulation and human-robot interaction to research improvements in healthcare. Researchers at HRL have been using ROS on EL-E and Cody, two of their assistive robots. They have also been publishing their source code at gt-ros-pkg.

HRL first started using ROS on EL-E for their work on Physical, Perceptual, and Sematic (PPS) tags (paper). EL-E has a variety of sensors and Katana arm mounted on a Videre ERRATIC mobile robot base. The video below shows off many of EL-E's capabilities, including a laser pointer interface -- people select objects in the real-world for the robot to interact with using a laser pointer.

HRL does much of their research work in Python, so you will find Python-friendly wrappers for much of EL-E's hardware, including the Hokuyo UTM laser rangefinder, Thing Magic M5e RFID antenna, and Zenither linear actuator. You can also get CAD diagrams and source code for building your own tilting Hokuyo 3D scanner.

HRL also has a new robot, Cody, which you can see in the video below:

Update: you can read more on Cody at Hizook.

The end effector and controller are described in the paper, "Pulling Open Novel Doors and Drawers with Equilibrium Point Control" (Humanoids 2009). They've also published the CAD models of the end effector and the source code can be found in the 2009_humanoids_epc_pull ROS package.

Whether it's providing open source drivers for commonly used hardware, CAD models of their experimental hardware, or source code to accompany their papers, HRL has embraced openness with their research. For more information:

• Healthcare Robotics Lab homepage
• gt-ros-pkg documentation ROS.org
• gt-ros-pkg source code on Google Code

Like the Aldebaran Nao, the "Prairie Dog" platform from the Correll Lab at Colorado University is an example of the ROS community building on each others' results, and the best part is that you can build your own.

Prairie Dog is an integrated teaching and research platform built on top of an iRobot Create. It's used in the Multi-Robot Systems course at Colorado University, which teaches core topics like locomotion, kinematics, sensing, and localization, as well as multi-robot issues like coordination. The source code for Prairie Dog, including mapping and localization libraries, is available as part of the prairiedog-ros-pkg ROS repository.

Prairie Dog uses a variety of off-the-shelf robot hardware components: an iRobot Create base, a 4-DOF CrustCrawler AX-12 arm, a Hokuyo URG-04LX laser rangefinder, a Hagisonic Stargazer indoor positioning system, and a Logitech QuickCam 3000. The Correll Lab was able to build on top of existing ROS software packages, such as brown-ros-pkg's irobot_create and robotis packages, plus contribute their own in prairiedog-ros-pkg. Prairie Dog is also integrated with the OpenRAVE motion planning environment.

Starting in the Fall of 2010, RoadNarrows Robotics will be offering a Prairie Dog kit, which will give you all the off-the-shelf components, plus the extra nuts and bolts. Pricing hasn't been announced yet, but the basic parts, including a netbook, will probably run about $3500.

For more information, please see:

• Prairie Dog homepage
• prairiedog-ros-pkg documentation on ROS.org

Photo: Prairie Dogs busy creating maps for kids and parents

The Care-O-bot 3 is a mobile manipulation robot designed by Fraunhofer IPA that is available both as a commercial robotic butler, as well as a platform for research. The Care-O-bot software has recently been integrated with ROS, and, in just short period of time, already supports everything from low-level device drivers to simulation inside of Gazebo.

The robot has two sides: a manipulation side and an interaction side. The manipulation side has a SCHUNK Lightweight Arm 3 with SDH gripper for grasping objects in the environment. The interaction side has a touchscreen tray that serves as both input and "output". People can use the touchscreen to select tasks, such as placing drink orders, and the tray can deliver objects to people, like their selected beverage.

The goals of the Care-O-bot research program are to:

• provide a common open source repository for the hardware platform
• provide simulation models of hardware components
• provide remote access to the Care-O-bot 3 hardware platform

Those first two goals are supported by the care-o-bot open source repository for ROS, which features libraries for drivers, simulation, and basic applications. You can easily download the source code and perform a variety of tasks in simulation, such as driving the base and moving the arm. These support the third goal of providing remote access to physical Care-O-Bot hardware via their webportal.

For sensing, the Care-O-bot uses two SICK S300 laser scanners, a Hokuyu URG-04LX laser scanner, two Pike F-145 firewire cameras for stereo, and Swissranger SR3000/SR4000s. The cob_driver stack provides ROS software integration for these sensors.

The Care-O-bot runs on a CAN interface with a SCHUNK LWA3 arm, SDH gripper, and a tray mounted on a PRL 100 for interacting with its environment. It also has a SCHUNK PW 90 and PW 70 pan/tilt units, which give it the ability to bow through its foam outer shell. The CAN interface is supported through several Care-O-bot ROS packages, including cob_generic_can and cob_canopen_motor, as well as wrappers for libntcan and libpcan. The SCHUNK components are also supported by various packages in the cob_driver stack.

The video below shows the Care-O-bot in action. NOTE: as the Care-O-bot source code is still being integrated with ROS, the capabilities you see in the video are not part of the ROS repository.

The Aldebaran Nao is a commercially available, 60cm tall, humanoid robot targeted at research lab and classrooms. The Nao is small, but it packs a lot into its tiny frame: four microphones, two VGA cameras, touch sensors on the head, infrared sensors, and more. The use of Nao with ROS has demonstrated how quickly open-source code can enable a community to come together around a common hardware platform.

The first Nao driver for ROS was released by Brown University's RLAB in November of 2009. This initial release included head control, text-to-speech, basic navigation, and access to the forehead camera. Just a couple of days later, the University of Freiburg's Humanoid Robot Lab used Brown's Nao driver to develop new capabilities, including torso odometry and joystick-based tele-operation. Development didn't stop there: in December, the Humanoid Robot Lab put together a complete ROS stack for the Nao that added IMU state, a URDF robot model, visualization of the robot state in rviz, and more.

The Nao SDK already comes with built-in support for the open-source OpenCV library. It will be exciting to see what additional capabilities the Nao will gain now that it can be connected to the hundreds of different ROS packages that are freely available.

Brown is also using open source and ROS as part of their research process:

Publishing our ROS code as well as research papers is now an integral part of disseminating our work. ROS provides the best means forward for enabling robotics researchers to share their results and more rapidly advance the state-of-the-art.

-- Chad Jenkins, Professor, Brown University

The University of Freiburg's Nao stack is available on alufr-ros-pkg. Brown's Nao drivers are available on brown-ros-pkg, along with drivers for the iRobot Create and a Gstream-based webcam driver.

With so many open-source repositories offering ROS libraries, we'd like to highlight the many different robots that ROS is being used on. It's only fitting that we start where ROS started with STAIR 1: STanford Artificial Intelligence Robot 1. Morgan Quigley created the Switchyard framework to provide a robot framework for their mobile manipulation platform, and it was the lessons learned from building software to address the challenges of mobile manipulation robots that gave birth to ROS.

Solving problems in the mobile manipulation space is too large for any one group. It requires multiple teams tackling separate challenges, like perception, navigation, vision, and grasping. STAIR 1 is research robot built to address these challenges: a Neuronics Katana Arm, a Segway base, and an ever-changing array of sensors, including a custom laser-line scanner, Hokuyo laser range finder, Axis PTZ, and more. The experience developing for this platform in a research environment provided many lessons for ROS: small components, simple reconfiguration, lightweight coupling, easy debugging, and scalable.

STAIR 1 has tackled a variety of research challenges, from accepting verbal commands to locate staplers, to opening doors, to operating elevators. You can watch the video of STAIR 1 operating an elevator below, and you can watch more videos and learn more about the STAIR program at stair.stanford.edu. You can also read Morgan's slides on ROS and STAIR from an IROS 2009 workshop.

In addition to the many contribution made to the core, open-source ROS system, you can also find STAIR-specific libraries at sail-ros-pkg.sourceforge.net/, including the code used for elevator operation.

We're pleased to announce that all of the packages within the Brown Ros Pkg collection have been updated for ROS-1.0.X compatibility. The Brown automated install script has also been updated to reflect these changes as well. This update should fix any problems caused by using the (formerly) 0.9.0 release with an updated roscore.

We encourage anyone interested to visit brown-ros-pkg . We currently have a driver for the iRobot Create, a basic driver for the Aldebaran Nao, and some basic vision packages.

Additions and improvements include:

probe

A ROS webcam capture node new to this release. Probe leverages Gstreamer, making it compatible with almost every Linux camera and video system available. In addition Gstreamer's software video processing can be used to emulate advanced features (e.g. white-balancing) even for cameras that don't have the appropriate v4l hardware support.

teleop_twist_keyboard

A simple keyboard-based teleop interface inspired by teleop_base. It's only dependencies are on the necessary geometry messages.

As always, we're interested in the communities feedback and suggestions.

_Trevor

Fast on the heels of the Brown Nao driver, Armin Hornung of Albert-Ludwigs-Unversität Freiburg has announced joy-package compatibility and torso odometry additions for the Nao driver -- as well as the alufr-ros-pkg repository. Armin's announcement is below.

Based on the recently announced Nao driver by Brown University, there is now a regular joystick teleoperation node available. It operates Nao using messages from the "joy" topic, so it should work with any gamepad or joystick in ROS. In addition, the control node running on Nao returns some basic torso odometry estimate. The code is available at http://code.google.com/p/alufr-ros-pkg/ to checkout via SVN. A README with more details can be found in the "nao" stack there.

I'm open for feedback and suggestions!

-- Armin

ROS is set up for distributed Open Source development. The system is designed to be built from a federation of repositories, each potentially run by a different organization. We've been happy to see three new ROS package repositories sprout up (besides those already hosted by Stanford, CMU, MIT, and TUM).

bosch-ros-pkg: Bosch has been extending our navigation stack to support frontier-based exploration and they have been contributing patches back to the personalrobots repository. Their wrapper for libgphoto2 has also been getting some use on the ros-users mailing list

gt-ros-pkg: Georgia Tech's Healthcare Robotics Lab has already contributed several packages and the Humanoid Robotics Lab and Socially Intelligent Machines Lab will be participating as well.

wu-ros-pkg: Washington University is also setting up a ROS package repository (which the many Wash-U alumni at Willow Garage are happy to see). Bill Smart's presentation, "Is a Common Middleware for Robotics Possible?" at IROS 2007 helped guide the philosophy and goals of ROS in its earliest stages, especially the focus on making reusable libraries.

Update: the personalrobots repository is now ros-pkg and wg-ros-pkg

A lot of people ask, "How is ROS different from X?" where X is another robotics software platform. For us, ROS was never about creating a platform with the most features, though we knew that the PR2 robot would drive many requirements. Instead, ROS is about creating a platform that would support sharing and collaboration. This may seem like an odd goal for a software framework, especially as it means that we want our code to be useful with or without ROS, but we think that one of the catalysts for robotics will be broad libraries of robotics drivers and algorithms that are freely available and easily integrated into any framework.

We're excited to see so many public ROS package repositories have already emerged. Here's the list that we know of:

• personalrobots.sourceforge.net: (see update) focused on Personal Robotics applications. Willow Garage is helping to maintain this repository with contributions from many others (Stanford, UPenn, TUM, CMU, MIT, etc...).
• sail-ros-pkg.sourceforge.net: started by ROS lead developer Morgan Quigley to house code from the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) code.
• cmu-ros-pkg.sourceforge.net: maintained by Rosen Diankov of CMU, who has also integrated OpenRAVE with ROS.
• tum-ros-pkg.sourceforge.net: contains several drivers released by Radu Rusu of TUM, who has also been busy with his many contributions to the personalrobots repository (e.g. point_cloud_mapping).
• code.google.com/p/lis-ros-pkg: contains an interface for the Barrett WAM and Hand, written by Kaijen Hsiao of MIT's Learning and Intelligent Systems Group

An ecosystem of federated package repositories is as important to ROS as the ROS node is for powering the distributed system of processes. Just as the ROS node is the unit of a ROS runtime, the ROS package is the unit of code sharing and the ROS package repository is the unit of collaboration. Each provides the opportunity for independent decisions about development and implementation, but all can be brought together with ROS infrastructure tools.

One of the tools we've written to support these federated repositories is roslocate. roslocate solves the problem of "where is package X?" For example, you can type "svn co `roslocate svn imagesift`" to quickly checkout the source code for the "imagesift" package from cmu-ros-pkg. As more ROS repositories emerge, we will continue to refine our tools so that multiple repositories can easily be an integral component of ROS development.

If you have any public repositories of your own that you'd like to share, drop us a note on ros-users and we'll add it to our list.