Recently in releases Category

Announcement from Armin Hornung, Humanoid Robotics Lab, Uni Freiburg

I'm pleased to announce the release of OctoMap 1.4, along with the updated octomap_mapping ROS stack for electric (see octomap.sf.net/ and ros.org/wiki/octomap_mapping). The updated viewer and visualization library "octovis" is available separately in the octomap_visualization stack.

The main new features since the latest stable 1.2 release are a new generalized IO functionality and file format for octrees, support for per-voxel color information in a specialized tree class (e.g. from the Kinect) and full support for Linux, Mac OS and Windows (the latter still experimental). The API remained mostly unchanged.

• Detailed changelog
• Download OctoMap (stand-alone library and visualization)

Ubuntu packages for ROS electric are being built and will be available in your package manager soon. Until then, you can get the octomap_mapping stack from http://code.google.com/p/alufr-ros-pkg/.

Your friendly neighborhood OctoMap team

We are happy to announce a new release of OMPL, version 0.10. All OMPL users are recommended to update to the new version. It includes the following changes:

• Windows support
• Added a primer on sampling-based motion planning and OMPL.
• Added an implementation of SyCLoP, a new multi-layered meta-planner that combines discrete search with a sampling-based motion planner. Implementations of Syclop with RRT and EST as the low-level planners are provided.
• Added an implementation of EST for planning with controls.
• New generic interface for parameter settings for almost anything that is user-configurable. This was done to simplify reading parameters from an input file (see next bullet).
• New benchmark program that allows one to easily specify benchmark problems with simple configuration files.
• New state spaces for Dubins vehicles and Reeds-Shepp vehicles. This allows one to use any geometric planner to compute feasible paths for such vehicles. See the demo program demo_GeometricCarPlanning.
• Added state serialization, deserialization, state space signatures.
• Added the notion of DirectedControlSampler.
• Added path hybridization, a technique for combining several solutions to a motion planning query to form a better bath. We also introduced a utility class called ParallelPlan that runs several planner instances in parallel and (optionally) uses path hybridization.
• Added a more advanced path shortcutting method.
• Added support for FCL collision checking library. PQP is actually still faster, and is therefore still the default.
• All versions of EST and SBL use the new PDF class to sample more efficiently from empirical probability distribution functions.
• Added a wrapper for boost::numeric::odeint to support high-order numerical integration of ordinary differential equations.
• Added support for multiple solution paths in a Goal datastructure.
• Added StateSpace::getValueAddressAtLocation() to allow faster indexing in states using state space names.

Point your browser to http://ompl.kavrakilab.org/download.html to download the latest version.

Announcement by Thomas Moulard (LAAS) to ros-users

Dear ROS users,

I am pleased to announce the first release of humanoid_walk.

This release provides C++ and ROS interfaces to allow humanoid robot walking trajectories generation.

Humanoid walking algorithms often take a set of footprints as input and provide feet and center of mass trajectories as output. These reference trajectories are then forwarded to the real-time controller.

This stack provides generic interfaces in order to wrap walking generation algorithm into ROS. It also provides an easy to use trajectory generator which can be used to generate motion.

The stack is available here: http://www.ros.org/wiki/humanoidwalk
...and is hosted on GitHub: http://www.github.com/laas/humanoidwalk

Bug reports, comments and patches are welcomed!

Announcement from Thomas Moulard (LAAS) to ros-users

Dear all,

I am pleased to announce the release of the motion_analysis_mocap stack.

This stack aims at integrating data from the Motion Analysis motion capture system into ROS.

This first public release provides a node which retrieve information from Cortex, the software provided by Motion Analysis and publishes them as both ROS topics (geometry_msgs/TransformStamped) and TF transformations.

Patches and feedbacks are welcomed through answers.ros.org or GitHub.

Best,
Thomas Moulard

Announcement by Dominick Vanthienen to ros-users

Dear ROS and OROCOS community,

The Robotics Group of the K.U.Leuven likes to announce the release of the new iTaSC software (iTaSC-2.0alpha). Information, documentation and installation instructions can be found on http://www.orocos.org/itasc . More documentation and example code will be made available in the coming weeks.

Kind regards,

The K.U.Leuven Robotics Group

What is iTaSC?

iTaSC stands for instantaneous Task Specification using Constraints, which is developed at the K.U.Leuven during the past years. The framework generates motions by specifying constraints in geometric, dynamic or sensor-space between the robots and their environment. These motion specifications constrain the relationships between objects (object frames) and their features (feature frames). Established robot motion specification formalisms such as the Operational Space Approach, the Task Function Approach, the Task Frame Formalism, Cartesian Space control, and Joint Space control are special cases of iTaSC and can be specified using the generic iTaSC methodology.

Announcement by Armin Hornung, Humanoid Robots Lab, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg to ros-users

I'm pleased to announce a major update and rewrite of Freiburg's footstep planner in the humanoid_navigation stack, mainly contributed by Johannes Garimort. The planner is now much faster and builds on SBPL. In addition to the previous D* Lite implementation, this now enables anytime planning e.g. with ARA* or AD*.

The ROS interface was largely kept compatible and you can interact with the planner using RViz as planning GUI (instruction on the wiki page). You can check out the humanoid_navigation stack from alufr-ros-pkg.

Best regards,
Armin

Announcement to ros-users by the RoboEarth team

Dear All,

We are happy to announce the RoboEarth ROS stack.

This stack currently allows you to create 3D object models and upload them to RoboEarth. It also provides packages to download any model stored in RoboEarth and detect the described object using a Kinect or an RGB-webcam.

The main packages are:

• re_object_recorder: Allows you to create your own 3D object model using Microsoft's Kinect sensor. By recording and merging point clouds gathered from different angles around the object, a detailed model is created, which may be shared with the world by uploading it to RoboEarth.
• re_kinect_object_detector: Allows you to detect objects you download from RoboEarth using a Kinect.
• re_vision: Allows you to detect objects you download from RoboEarth using a common RGB camera (i.e., no Kinect is required for detection).

For more information, please see the http://www.ros.org/wiki/roboearth or our web site http://www.roboearth.org

Additionally, a demonstration video is available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uMCa-dgtFE

We are looking forward to your feedback.

The RoboEarth Team info@roboearth.org

Announcement from Armin Hornung of Humanoid Robots Lab, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg to ros-users

I'm pleased to announce the release of OctoMap 1.2, along with the updated octomap_mapping ROS stack for diamondback, electric, and unstable (see official octomap page and ROS wiki page). This is major step up from the OctoMap 1.0 release and features many under-the-hood improvements (speedup, leaner code, testing, bug fixes) as well as an improved interface for fellow developers. Key features of the new version are: an adjustable sensor model, node-iterators, time-stamped nodes, and an improved make system. A clean separation of the visualization library means that the octomap_mapping stack no longer depends on Qt or OpenGL (our visualization "octovis" will be released later as an additional ROS package). Furthermore, all output in the octomap package is now using proper ROS log levels (thanks to Eric Perko for the patch).

Detailed changelog

Download OctoMap (stand-alone library and visualization)

ROS packages for diamondback, electric, and unstable are being built and will be available soon. Until then, you can get the `octomap_mapping stack from alufr-ros-pkg

Your friendly neighborhood OctoMap team (Kai and Armin)

Announcement by Ivan Dryanovski of ccny-ros-pkg to ros-users

Hi everyone,

We pushed out new debian releases of the asctec_drivers, mav_tools, and scan_tools stacks, The stacks support diamondback, electric, and unstable.

Here are some highlights of the changes:

scan_tools:

• canonical_scan_matcher has been renamed to laser_scan_matcher;
• laser_scan_matcher now supports multiple sources of predictive input such as imu, odometry, and alpha-beta velocity tracking; can work with laser scans or pcl pointclouds
• laser_ortho_projector behavior significantly changed to match new laser_scan_matcher - check the wiki page for details

asctec_drivers:

• Imu messages published by asctec_proc now take data from the IMUCalcData/acc_*_calib fields (instead of previous incorrect acc_*). The values are measured in different frames of reference; if you are using the /mab/Imu messages, you will need to account for this change.

We also improved the nodelet support in all packages and fixed various bugs reported by the community.

Cheers,

Ivan

Debian packages for ROS Diamondback are now available for Ubuntu Natty Narwhal. We have updated the Diamondback installation instructions so that you can now apt-get install ROS on your new Natty machines. Thanks to all in the community who have helped up upgrade ROS to the latest versions of GCC, Python, and other changes that came with Natty. A special thanks goes to Vincent Rabaud, who did a tremendous effort to get most of the 140+ ROS Diamondback stacks compatible with the latest Ubuntu release.

René Ladan has also updated the FreeBSD packages for ROS to the Diamondback versions, so you can now install the ros, ros_comm, documentation, and rx stacks.

The majority of stacks in ROS Unstable are now also compatible with the Natty release.

A new version of ROS C Turtle has been released. This update includes ROS 1.2.6, support for CCNY's MAV libraries, and several other updates listed below.

• ccny_vision 1.0.0
• linux_networking 0.1.12
• mav_tools 0.1.0
• octomap_mapping 0.2.0
• point_cloud_perception 0.3.2.8
• pr2_calibration 0.5.1
• ros 1.2.6
• wg_hardware_test 0.3.4

The octree-based mapping library OctoMap has just been released as stable version 1.0 . There is now full-blown doxygen documentation available.

Based on OctoMap 1.0, a new version of the octomap_mapping stack was also just released for cturtle, diamondback, and unstable. Debian packages will appear in the Ubuntu ROS repositories soon, diamondback builds should be already available in the shadow-fixed repository for those willing to try them out. New in the octomap_mapping stack is the octomap_ros package to ease the integration of OctoMap with ROS / PCL.

Your friendly neighborhood OctoMap team (Kai and Armin)

Links:

• octomap.sf.net
• octomap for ROS

ROS Diamondback has been released! This newest distribution of ROS gives you more drivers, more libraries, and more 3D processing. We've also worked on making it lighter and more configurable to help you use ROS on smaller platforms.

Install ROS Diamondback

ROS 3D

The Kinect is a game-changer for robotics and is used on ROS robots around the world. ROS is now integrated with OpenNI Kinect/PrimeSense drivers and the Point Cloud Library (PCL) 3D-processing library has a new stable release for Diamondback. The ROS 3D contest entries showed the many creative ways you can integrate the Kinect with your robot, and we will continue to work on making the Kinect easier to use with ROS. We've also redone our C++ APIs to make OpenCV easier-to-use in ROS.

A Growing Community, More Robots

Diamondback is the first ROS distribution release to launch with stacks from the broader ROS community. Thank you to contributors from UT Austin, Uni Freiburg, Bosch, ETH Zurich, KU Leuven, UMD, Care-O-bot, TUM, University of Arizona and CCNY for making their drivers, libraries, and tools available. Many more robots are easier-to-use with ROS thanks to their efforts.

Now that there are over 50 different robots able to use ROS -- mobile manipulators, UAVs, AUVs, and more -- we are providing robot-specific portals to give you the best possible "out of the box" experience. If you have a Roomba, Nao, Care-O-bot, Lego NXT robot, Erratic, miabotPro, or PR2, there are now central pages to help you install and get the most out of ROS. Look for more robots in the coming weeks and months to be added to that list.

Smaller, lighter

We've reorganized ROS itself and broken it into four separate pieces: "ros", "ros_comm", "rx", and "documentation". This enables you to use ROS in both GUI and GUI-less configuration, which will enable you to install ROS on your robot with much smaller footprint. This separation will also assist with porting ROS to other platforms and integrating the ROS packaging system with non-ROS communication frameworks. For more details, see REP 100.

More open

Since ROS C Turtle, we've adopted a new ROS Enhancement Proposal (REP) process to make it easier for you to propose changes to ROS. We have also transitioned ownership of the ROS camera drivers to Jack O'Quin at UT Austin and look forward to enabling more people in the outside community to have greater ownership over the key libraries and tools in ROS. Please see our handoff list to find ways to become more involved as a contributor.

Answers

We launched the ROS Answers several weeks ago to make it easier for you to get in touch with a community of ROS experts. It is quickly becoming the best knowledge base on ROS with over 200 questions in a wide variety of topics.

Other highlights

For more information, please see the Diamondback release notes. Some of the additional highlights include:

• Eigen 3 support, with compatibility for Eigen 2.
• camera1394 now supports nodelets and has been relicensed as LGPL.
• rosjava has been updated and is now maintained by Lorenz Moesenlechner of TUM.
• bond makes it easier to let two ROS nodes monitor each other for termination.
• rosh is a new experimental Python scripting environment for ROS.
• New nodelet-based topic tools
• PointCloud2 support in the ROS navigation stack.

Thanks

From the numerous contributed stacks to patches to bug reports, this release would not have been possible without the help of the ROS community. In particular, we appreciate your help testing and improving the software and documentation for the Diamondback release candidates to make this the best release possible. We hope that Diamondback helps you get more done with your robots, and we look forward to your contributions in future releases.

The third candidate of ROS Diamondback is now available! We intend for this to be our final release candidate, so please report any critical issues that you find. We will be focusing on improving source-based install methods between now and the final release.

This update comes with PCL 0.10, which has the stable API that will be used in PCL 1.0. The ROS 3D contest demonstrated many useful applications of PCL with robotics, and we're excited to have this stable release for Diamondback. We encourage users to provide feedback on tutorials and example applications to help guide PCL to its 1.0 milestone, which we are targeting for the ROS Electric Emy release in August.

Thank you to the many users who have submitted patches and bug reports to help improve these release candidates, including (but not limited to): andrewstraw, mdesnoyer, timn, ryohei, snorri, soetens, nbutko, nevion, willylambert, stevenbellens, isucan, gbiggs, atr, rene, bouffard, dthomas, joq, and lorenz.

ROS Diamondback RC3 Installation Instructions

Major updates:

• ROS 1.4.6
• common 1.4.3
• perception_pcl 0.10

The second candidate of ROS Diamondback is now available! We invite members of the community to test this second release candidate and identify any potential integration issues. We anticipate doing one more release candidate before the official Diamondback release, which is slated for the end of this month.

In addition to several bug fixes, this release also includes stacks from ccny-ros-pkg, including drivers for AscTec quadrotors. We appreciate the efforts of the CCNY Robotics Lab in putting together these releases.

ROS Diamondback RC2 Installation Instructions

New stacks:

• ccny_vision
• asctec_drivers
• mav_tools

Updates

• ROS 1.4.4, 1.4.5
• ros_comm 1.4.2, 1.4.3
• rx 1.4.1
• common 1.4.1
• geometry 1.4.1
• vision_opencv 1.4.1
• PR2: belt compensators are no longer enabled by default

The first release candidate of ROS Diamondback is now available! Thanks to the help from the community, we've been able to make numerous improvements to our Diamondback Beta releases and are now ready to put out our first release candidate.

We have also been putting together new robot-centric API and installation guides, which we hope will help organize the various ROS libraries better for new ROS users. We have setup some example pages and welcome others in the community to do the same:

• Care-O-bot
• Erratic
• NXT
• PR2

Stack contributors: You are now welcome to start releasing against Diamondback directly. We had disabled some stacks in Diamondback due to some integration issues that have now been resolved. You can view the build status to check whether or not your stack is currently included.

Known issues:

• Integration is still on-going for OS X and other Non-Ubuntu platforms.
• Final Diamondback release is awaiting PCL 1.0.

Announcement by Ruben Smits to ros-users

The Orocos Toolchain ROS stack developers are pleased to announce a new release of the orocos_toolchain_ros stack.

Debian packages are already available for unstable, diamondback and cturtle (only for lucid and maverick) will be available soon.

Most important changes:

• We moved the development to GIT: the stack is available here (only http protocol is supported). Since we use git submodules do not forget to use -- recursive if you clone or to issue git submodule init;git submodule update after cloning.

• Integration of RTT/Properties and ROS/Parameters: a new RTT service is available in the rtt_ros_param package that allows RTT users to store component properties on the ROS parameter server or to refresh them using values on the ROS parameter server. The integration also works seamlessly for your complex types as long as a RTT/Typekit for the type exists. Check here for more details.

• The RTT typekit and transportkit generation for messages now creates a single library/typekit/transportkit for each package instead of one for each message type.

• RTT and OCL are now native ROS packages, which allows us to use rosmake directly on the RTT and OCL source.

• OCL offers a orocreate-pkg tool to create a new Orocos package (which uses rosbuild behind the scenes if available) including template code for components, typekits, plugins and services.

• the OCL/deployer can now be used with roslaunch, each deployed process becomes a single node, containing the different deployed components.

• the OCL/deployer now uses rospack in its import functionality, to find new component libraries, services, plugins, typekits and transportkits.

What's still on the roadmap:

• Nicer solution for sequence types in the rosparam integration
• Integration of the RTT/logging with the ROS/logging
• Integration of RTT/Operations and ROS/Services (This one is currently on a hold because the feasibility is still uncertain)

More information:

• Using Orocos/RTT
• orocreate-pkg
• Creating Orocos packages

-- Your friendly Orocos-ROS integration team.

Our second beta release of ROS Diamondback is now available (installation instructions). Thank you to the many users who have reported issues with the first beta release. We also appreciate the users who have updated Diamondback instructions for the many various platforms ROS is available on. A special thank you goes to Nicholas Butko, who provided numerous patches to improve OS X compatibility.

In addition to OS X updates, this release continues our rollout of Eigen 2/3 compatibility and also cleans up various stack dependencies and installation variants. There are still several fixes and updates we wish to deploy before we reach release candidate status.

Install ROS Diamondback Beta

A beta release of ROS Diamondback is now available (installation instructions). We encourage users to try this beta release out and report any issues. We also encourage users who were using "unstable" to switch to Diamondback at this time as they are equivalent. We expect a very short beta period before our first release candidate.

The release of Diamondback is currently delayed due to integration of Eigen 3. Eigen 3 has become an important library in the robotics community, but it was originally incompatible with Eigen 2. The Eigen developers have been very responsive in introducing backwards compatibility modes, and we've determined that it would be better integrate with the updated library than to attempt to implement custom workarounds.

We still anticipate releasing Diamondback release this month, but we need your help to test Diamondback early and often, especially our Eigen integration. We also request the help of our OS X/Arch/Fedora/Gentoo/OpenSUSE/Slackware community to test integration and installation instructions for those platforms.

Install ROS Diamondback Beta

ROS C Turtle has been updated with new debian packages. This update is mainly to include compatibility with image_transport_plugins on Ubuntu Maverick.

Changes:

• client_rosjava 0.1.3
• cob_common 0.1.0
• image_transport_plugins 0.3.2
• simulator_stage 1.2.3
• web_interface 0.4.4
• wg_hardware_test 0.3.2

A new update to C Turtle has been released. This new release contains the first release of the erratic_robot stack, which supports the Videre Erratic platform. This stack is now maintained by Antons Rebguns/ua-ros-pkg and includes drivers, robot description, and navigation configuration.

• camera_drivers 1.2.7
• common_tutorials 0.1.2
• erratic_robot 0.1.0
• linux_networking 0.1.7
• pr2_simulator 1.2.3

A new release of debian packages is out. We have updated our debian-building infrastructure in preparation for ROS Diamondback, so please report any issues to ros-users.

• common 1.2.2
• executive_smach 1.0.0
• point_cloud_perception 0.3.2.7
• pr2_common 1.2.3
• pr2_controllers 1.2.6
• pr2_self_test 0.3.1
• robot_model 1.2.4

This is a minor update mainly to deal with integration issues with PCL and Eigen.

• client_rosjava 0.1.2
• diagnostics 1.2.5
• geometry_experimental 0.1.3
• physics_ode 1.2.8
• point_cloud_perception 0.3.2.6
• pr2_self_test 0.3.0
• simulator_gazebo 1.2.8
• vslam 0.1.7

This newest update of C Turtle now lets you get the various stacks necessary for running or simulating Fraunhofer IPA's Care-O-bot 3. PR2 and Care-O-bot have shared a dance together, and Care-O-bot is waving the Jolly Roger in the C Turtle poster, so we're excited to have the five Care-O-bot stacks join the official distribution. You can find out more on the care-o-bot wiki page.

This is also the first release of the experimental rosjava client for ROS. The existing client has been taken over by Lorenz Moesenlechner at TUM and has been updated to work with the upcoming Diamondback release.

Updates:

• art_vehicle 0.3.2
• camera_drivers 1.2.6
• client_rosjava 0.1.1
• cob_apps 0.0.1
• cob_common 0.0.1
• cob_driver 0.0.1
• cob_extern 0.0.1
• cob_simulation 0.0.1
• geometry_experimental 0.1.2
• point_cloud_perception 0.3.2.5
• ros_applications 0.1.0
• slam_gmapping 1.2.2

Our latest C Turtle update has octomap_mapping and freiburg_tools stacks from the University of Freiburg (alufr-ros-pkg). We have also updated the kinect stack to include the latest calibration code and our kinect calibration tutorials has more instructions.

• continuous_ops 0.1.0
• driver_common 1.2.3
• joystick_drivers 1.2.2
• kinect 0.1.6
• linux_networking 0.1.6
• motion_planners 0.2.8
• motion_planning_common 0.2.7
• navigation_experimental 0.1.4
• octomap_mapping 0.1.2
• freiburg_tools 0.1.2
• point_cloud_perception 0.3.2.3
• pr2_common 1.2.2
• pr2_navigation 0.1.5
• pr2_plugs 0.3.11
• pr2_web_apps 0.3.11
• ros_release 0.1.7
• simulator_stage 1.2.2
• slam_gmapping 1.2.1
• web_interface 0.4.3
• visualization 1.2.1

Announcement from Stefan Holzer

Hi all,

We've been working very hard to get PCL to work in Windows for the past few days and we are happy to announce the release of PCL 0.6! Because one of our friends and colleagues is turning 30 tomorrow, we decided to dedicate this release to him. Happy Birthday Bastian!

The 0.6 release brings:

• preliminary Windows support
• FLANN 1.6.2
• Cminpack 1.1.0
• portability fixes for MacOS
• functionality patches and bug-fixes

Complete change-list

Thanks to all the contributors!

With this release, the core PCL libraries (dependencies and ROS wrappers) moved to the perception_pcl stack, while the visualization tools and tutorials moved to the perception_pcl_addons stack. No further development of PCL will be done in the old point_cloud_perception stack.

PS. Remember to bookmark http://www.pointclouds.org :)

Cheers,
Stefan

Announcement from Armin Hornung of Albert-Ludwigs-Universität

The OctoMap 3D mapping library is now available as precompiled .deb package for Ubuntu in the ROS cturtle and unstable repositories. The octomap_mapping stack contains the actual octomap package for ROS and a map server. Detailed API documentation is available at the wiki page under "Code API".

This coincides with the release of OctoMap v0.8, which the octomap_mapping stack now builds on. Compared to previous versions, the optimizations in OctoMap 0.8 significantly speed up map building and queries on the map. As always, we're curious to hear how you use OctoMap and if there are suggestions for further improvements.

Best regards,
Armin Hornung and Kai M. Wurm

Just in the time for Thanksgiving, we've got some new things for the ROS and ROS-Kinect community to play with.

• Access to Kinect's raw IR image
• Kinect debians for C Turtle
• ROS debians for Ubuntu Maverick on C Turtle

For the Kinect, we've achieved a major breakthrough: access to the IR camera image. Now that we have access to the raw IR camera image, instead of just the depth image, we can do monocular and stereo calibration using the regular ROS calibration tools and methods. We're taking a short break for Thanksgiving, but we should have RGB/depth calibration by the end of the week.

Regularly ROS-Kinect users can just update to the get these changes -- or you can try

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ros-cturtle-kinect

We have a lot more in the works, so stay tuned. Happy Thanksgiving!

TheCorpora has put out their own Linux distribution, based on Ubuntu 10.04, that neatly packages everything you need to get up and running with Qbo. It comes with ROS, OpenCV, Festival speech synthesis, Julius speech recognition, Qbo-specific libraries, and more. This includes capabilities, like Qbo_Visual_Slam, shown below:

In this latest C Turtle update, we are now including two stacks from utexas-art-ros-pkg: art_vehicle and velodyne.

• art_vehicle 0.3.1
• velodyne 0.2.0

Other updates:

• camera_drivers 1.2.5
• driver_common 1.2.2
• joystick_drivers 1.2.1
• motion_planning_common 0.2.5
• pr2_ethercat_drivers 1.2.4
• ros_realtime 0.4.2

A new C Turtle Update has been released. This update is significant in that we have the first externally managed ROS stack available for download: orocos_toolchain_ros. This stack, produced by kul-ros-pkg, provides integration between ROS and the Orocos software framework.

We also have several stacks related to Diamondback. roshpit allows users to download and test the upcoming rosh shell, which will officially debut in ROS 1.4. There are also new empty ros_comm and rx stacks, which have been added so that stacks can be compatible with both C Turtle and Diamondback packaging, once the "ros" stack has been split.

General Updates:

• ros 1.2.4
• camera_drivers 1.2.4
• diagnostics 1.2.3
• driver_common 1.2.1
• executive_smach 0.4.1
• graph_mapping 0.1.3
• image_pipeline 1.2.2
• image_transport_plugins 0.3.1
• linux_networking 0.1.5
• motion_planners 0.2.6
• orocos_toolchain_ros 0.1.6
• robot_calibration 0.3.1
• robot_model 1.2.3
• simulator_gazebo 1.2.5
• slam_karto 0.1.6
• vision_opencv 1.2.5
• vslam 0.1.6

Diamondback-compatibility Updates:

• roshpit 0.2.0
• ros_comm 0.0.1
• rx 0.0.1

PR2 and WG Updates:

• cart_pushing 0.1.0
• pr2_calibration 0.5.0
• pr2_ethercat_drivers 1.2.3
• pr2_mechanism 1.2.2
• pr2_power_drivers 1.0.8
• pr2_robot 1.0.5
• pr2_self_test 0.2.0
• wg_common 0.1.3
• wg_pr2_apps 0.1.2

ROS 1.3.0 has been released. This is an unstable release and is the first of the 1.3.x "odd-cycle" releases. During this release cycle, we expect to rapidly integrate new features and the stack is expected to be volatile.

In particular, much of the work for the ROS 1.3.x release cycle is related to REP 100, ROS Stack Separation. There are several major changes in this initial release, with more to come. For ROS 1.3.0, we have implemented the following changes:

• genmsg_cpp has been deleted. This ends support for the current experimental rosoct and rosjava libraries.
• All rx* packages have been moved to the rx stack. This was done to remove heavyweight WxWindows dependencies from the ROS stack.
• rosdoc has been moved to the new documentation stack. This was done to remove heavyweight Doxygen, Epydoc, and Sphinx dependencies from the ROS stack.

The next major change will be to migrate the ROS middleware libraries to the ros_comm stack. This will mainly have impact on stack dependency declarations.

We've also included deprecation warnings in the rosrecord and rosbagmigration packages for this release. Use of these APIs should be ported to the new rosbag library, which has support for the latest bag format.

For more changes, please the ROS 1.3.0 changelist.

Also, you may wish to now consult the rx and documentation stack changelists for packages that were formerly in the ROS stack.

For more information on the ROS 1.3.x releases, you can see REP 101, ROS 1.4 Release Schedule.

Rene Ladan has been working hard over the past several months providing patches to ROS in order to improve FreeBSD compatibility. Now he's announced the first FreeBSD package for ROS, which makes installation patch-free and no-hassle.

Hi,

The first FreeBSD package for ROS is now available, providing the equivalent of ros-cturtle-ros on Ubuntu (but without the build directories). The cleaned up instructions are available at the wiki.

Thanks go to the ROS developers for applying all the patches I sent to them.

I will probably add more ROS packages in the future, starting with the tutorials and the Lego NXT stacks (the latter because that's the only robot I have myself, apart from some webcams).

Regards,
Rene

http://www.rene-ladan.nl/

Steven Bellens and Koen Buys from kul-ros-pkg have announced a new camera_pose_estimation stack

We've put a first version of our camera_pose_estimation stack online, available in the kul-ros-pkg repository.

The stack builds upon the ar_pose package, but allows tracking markers with multiple cameras taking into account measurement uncertainty as provided in the ARMarker message, as opposed to the ar_pose package which allows tracking one / multiple markers with a single camera. All available estimates are converted to world coordinates and fused using an Extended Kalman Filter as provided in BFL. If you have any suggestions/comments/questions about the stack, let us know!

best regards,

Steven Bellens
Koen Buys

Link

On the heels of the Orocos RTT 2.0 release, Ruben Smits from KU Leuven has announced the first version of the new-and-improved Orocos/ROS integration

Hi orocos-dev, orocos-users, ros-users,

A first version of our Orocos/ROS integration is ready in the form of the orocostoolchainros stack.

The stack is available at:

• released version:
  • tarball
  • svn: svn co http://svn.mech.kuleuven.be/repos/orocos/trunk/kul-ros-pkg/stacks/orocos_toolchain_ros/tags/orocos_toolchain_ros-0.1.0 orocos_toolchain_ros
• developers version: svn co http://svn.mech.kuleuven.be/repos/orocos/trunk/kul-ros-pkg/stacks/orocos_toolchain_ros/trunk orocos_toolchain_ros

The stack contains all of the Orocos Toolchain v2.0.1 except for the autoproj build system. The orocos_toolchain_ros stack contains patched versions of orogen and utilmm to automatically create ros packages instead of autoproj packages for the automatic typekit generation for c++ classes.

On top of the Orocos Toolchain v2.0 this stack contains:

• rtt_ros_integration: This package contains the following:
  • The ros-plugin: this RTT plugin allows Orocos/RTT components to contact the ROS master
  • CMake macro's to automatically create Orocos/RTT typekits and transport plugins from .msg files
• rtt_ros_integration_std_msgs: This package shows how the CMake macro's have to be used, it creates the Orocos/RTT typekits and transport plugins for all roslib and std_msgs messages
• rtt_ros_integration_example: This package shows how the rtt_ros_integration should be used from an Orocos/RTT user/developer point of view. It contains a HelloRobot component which can be contacted using rostopic echo

And last but not least the stack also includes the rtt_exercises package for Orocos/RTT new-commers.

The orocos_toolchain_ros stack itself still remains undocumented, I'm currently working on that, but documentation on the Orocos Toolchain can be found via: http://http://www.orocos.org/wiki/orocos/toolchain.

If anyone has any questions please do not hesitate to contact the orocos-users, orocos-dev or ros-users mailing list.
Ruben

ROS C Turtle Update 1 has been released. The list of updates includes:

• pr2_tabletop_manipulation_apps 0.2.1
• point_cloud_perception 0.2.8
• topological_navigation 0.1.2
• simulator_gazebo 1.2.3
• pr2_simulator 1.2.1
• sql_database 0.2.1
• pr2_object_manipulation 0.2.1
• physics_ode 1.2.2
• object_manipulation 0.2.2
• tabletop_object_perception 0.2.1

We are happy to announce the release of a number of stacks that provide core functionality for grasping and manipulation tasks, as well as example applications on the PR2 robot. These include:

• object_manipulation
• pr2_object_manipulation
• tabletop_object_perception
• pr2_tabletop_manipulation_apps

Additional details, tutorials and example application can be found on the ROS Wiki. Good places to start checking out the available functionality are:

• object_manipulation (for core, robot-independent functionality)
• pr2_tabletop_manipulation_apps (for applications, demos and tutorials on the PR2 robot).

Complementing the manipulation stacks is a database of household objects containing information relevant for manipulation tasks, along with its ROS interface. Details can be found on the household_objects_database page.

Please note that these are "research stacks", under active development. While we have put a lot of effort into reviewing and documenting them, they are likely to be less stable than "core" ROS stacks which have reached 1.x releases. That said, we believe that they will provide useful functionality for building towards complex mobile manipulation applications.

Any feedback, bug reports or success stories of using these stacks will be greatly appreciated.

Best,
Your Merry ROS Manipulation Mob

ROS C Turtle has been released!

ROS C Turtle is the second ROS distribution release. ROS Box Turtle was released March 2, 2010 and included stable releases of ROS and core libraries and tools like navigation, rviz, hardware drivers, and an image-processing pipeline.

ROS C Turtle builds on Box Turtle with across-the-board improvements to these core libraries and numerous bug fixes. These improvements include a new "nodelet" architecture that provides low-latency, zero-copy message passing within C++ nodes, official support for a Lisp client library, and an official firewire camera driver (thanks to Jack O'Quin). Numerous third-party libraries have been upgraded in this release, including Stage 3.2.2, Bullet 2.76, and Eigen 2.0.15, as well as newer versions of KDL and Gazebo. There are many, many other improvements listed in the change list.

This release includes new experimental libraries for 3D perception, manipulation, grasping, and visual odometry. We encourage early adopters to test out these libraries and provide feedback so that they can be stabilized for future ROS releases.

Since the release of Box Turtle, the ROS community has grown immensely. There are over a dozen new public, open-source repositories of ROS code, and ROS has been ported to a variety of different robot platforms, from mobile manipulators to autonomous boats. Commercial robotics software libraries like Urbi and Karto now have open-source offerings that are compatible with ROS, and the list of robot platforms that can be used with ROS continues to grow. We're excited at these new opportunities to collaborate within the community and hope that you all enjoy this C Turtle release.

ROS distribution releases occur on a six-month cycle. The successor to C Turtle, Diamondback, is expected in February of 2011.

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

• ROS
• executive_python
• geometry
• pr2_controllers
• pr2_ethercat_drivers
• pr2_plugs
• pr2_doors
• vslam

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 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.

• ROS 1.1.16
• camera_drivers 1.2.0
• common 1.2.0
• common_msgs 1.2.0
• driver_common 1.2.0
• imu_drivers 1.2.0
• joystick_drivers 1.2.0
• joystick_drivers_tutorials 1.2.0
• laser_drivers 1.2.0
• point_cloud_perception 0.2.0
• pr2_simulator 1.2.0
• simulator_gazebo 1.2.1
• sound_drivers 1.2.0
• visualization 1.2.0
• visualization_common 1.2.0

Change lists

• ROS
• camera_drivers
• common
• common_msgs
• driver_common
• imu_drivers
• joystick_drivers
• joystick_drivers_tutorials
• laser_drivers
• point_cloud_perception
• pr2_simulator
• simulator_gazebo
• sound_drivers
• visualization
• visualization_common

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 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

• ROS
• common
• common_msgs
• graph_mapping
• image_common
• image_pipeline
• robot_model
• physics_ode
• pr2_mechanism
• pr2_common
• pr2_common_actions
• pr2_controllers
• pr2_doors
• pr2_ethercat_drivers
• pr2_mechanism
• pr2_plugs
• pr2_robot
• robot_calibration
• simulator_gazebo
• simulator_stage
• slam_gmapping
• slam_karto
• vision_opencv
• vslam

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.

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.

• ros 1.1.14
• common 1.1.10
• geometry 1.1.8
• pr2_common 1.1.3
• pr2_controllers 1.2.3
• ros_tutorials 0.2.0
• pr2_simulator 1.1.3
• simulator_gazebo 1.1.12
• people 0.1.0
• sql_database 0.1.1
• object_manipulation 0.1.0
• pr2_object_manipulation 0.1.0
• pr2_tabletop_manipulation 0.1.0
• tabletop_object_perception 0.1.0

Change lists

• ros
• common
• geometry
• pr2_common
• pr2_controllers
• ros_tutorials
• pr2_simulator
• simulator_gazebo
• people
• sql_database
• object_manipulation
• pr2_object_manipulation
• pr2_tabletop_manipulation
• tabletop_object_perception

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
• common
• diagnostics
• navigation
• pr2_apps
• pr2_common_actions
• pr2_mechanism
• pr2_simulator
• robot_model
• ros_realtime
• simulator_gazebo
• visualization
• visualization_common

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.

• ros 1.1.12
• camera_drivers 1.1.4
• common 1.1.8
• geometry 1.1.7
• joystick_drivers 1.1.2
• pr2_common 1.1.2
• pr2_mechanism 1.1.1
• pr2_robot 1.0.1
• pr2_simulator 1.1.1
• robot_model 1.2.0
• roslisp_support 0.2.5
• simulator_gazebo 1.1.8
• executive_python 0.2.0
• pr2_common_actions 0.2.0
• pr2_doors 0.3.3
• pr2_calibration 0.4.3
• pr2_plugs 0.3.1
• topological_navigation 0.1.1
• web_interface 0.4.1

Change lists

• ros
• camera_drivers
• common
• geometry
• joystick_drivers
• pr2_common
• pr2_mechanism
• pr2_robot
• pr2_simulator
• robot_model
• roslisp_support
• simulator_gazebo
• executive_python
• pr2_common_actions
• pr2_doors
• pr2_calibration
• pr2_plugs
• topological_navigation
• web_interface
• camera_drivers
• joystick_drivers

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:

• camera_drivers 1.0.4
• driver_common 1.0.4
• geometry 1.0.3
• pr2_ethercat_drivers 1.0.6

Change lists

• camera_drivers
• driver_common
• geometry
• pr2_robot
• pr2_common
• pr2_ethercat_drivers
• pr2_power_drivers
• ros_realtime
• simulator_gazebo

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.

ROS 1.1.8 has been released. This is the feature freeze release of ROS. Future releases in the ROS 1.1.x series will be bug-fix only, and ROS 1.2 will be based on the features and APIs of this release. Now that ROS is feature frozen, we encourage developers to test integration with ROS 1.1.8 and report any problems you find. This release should be backwards-compatible with ROS 1.0, though we have removed APIs that were deprecated in the ROS 1.0 release.

To report bugs, please use the ROS issue issue tracker.

This release focused on new features for rosbag and rxbag, as well as new APIs for rosbuild, new std_msgs/Time and Duration msgs, and a rosclean tool for easily removing log files. Please see the full change list for more details.

The SVN tag will will be using for testing the ROS 1.2 release candidates is: https://code.ros.org/svn/ros/stacks/ros/tags/cturtle

We will soon be releasing an alpha version of ROS C-Turtle, so please stay tuned.

-- your friendly neighborhood ROS development team

We're getting close to being feature-complete for most of the C-Turtle stacks. There has been a flurry of releases with the expected functionality for the next distribution release, and we will be stabilizing these over the next several weeks as we finalize C-Turtle.

• camera_drivers 1.1.0
• driver_common 1.0.3
• image_pipeline 1.1.5
• navigation 1.0.7
• navigation 1.1.3
• pr2_calibration 0.4.2
• pr2_doors 0.3.0
• pr2_ethercat_drivers 1.1.3
• pr2_robot 0.4.6
• robot_model 1.1.4
• roslisp_support 0.2.4
• simulator_stage 1.1.1
• vision_opencv 1.2.3
• visualization 1.1.1
• visualization_common 1.1.1
• web_interface 0.4.0

Change lists

• camera_drivers
• driver_common
• image_pipeline
• navigation
• pr2_calibration
• pr2_doors
• pr2_ethercat_drivers
• pr2_robot
• robot_model
• roslisp_support
• simulator_stage
• vision_opencv
• visualization
• visualization_common
• web_interface

ROS 1.0.4 (stable/boxturtle) has been released. This release fixes a regression in roscpp's getParamCached() method that meant it hit the master every time it was called if the parameter didn't exist.

Full 1.0 changelist

Several patch releases have been made, including ROS 1.1.7, which fixes issues with roslaunch and paramiko on Ubuntu Jaunty. The rest of the patch releases are for Box Turtle and are listed below.

• ros 1.1.7
• driver_common 1.0.2
• joystick_drivers 1.0.3
• pr2_power_drivers 1.0.5
• simulator_stage 1.0.1
• web_interface 0.3.20
• visualization 1.0.4

Change lists

• ros
• driver_common
• joystick_drivers
• pr2_power_drivers
• simulator_stage
• web_interface
• visualization

ROS 1.1.6 has been released. This will be one of the last releases in the 1.1.x series as we are quickly approaching feature freeze. You can read the change list for more information. NOTE: ROS 1.1.5 contains an error with the gtest package and should not be used.

Several other stacks in the C-Turtle unstable development series have been updated as well, including:

• common 1.1.13
• image_common 1.1.0
• joystick_drivers 1.1.1
• navigation 1.1.2
• pr2_calibration 0.4.1
• pr2_ethercat_drivers 1.1.2
• robot_model 1.1.3
• slam_gmapping 1.1.1
• sound_drivers 1.1.0

Change lists

• common
• image_common
• joystick_drivers
• navigation
• pr2_calibration
• pr2_ethercat_drivers
• robot_model
• slam_gmapping
• sound_drivers

geometry 1.1.2 and robot_model 1.1.2

This announces geometry 1.1.2 and robot_model 1.1.2 are released into latest. These are unstable releases, with API changes. Unless you are working toward the next release it is recommended to remain on boxturtle.

Note: There are some permutations of updating which creates a linking error for undefined references into bullet. If you get these errors, use rosmake with the --pre-clean option and it will work fine. This has only been observed when following a specific sequence of updates.

• geometry change list
• robot_model change list

point_cloud_perception 0.1.6

PCL (Point Cloud Library) 0.1.6 and the point_cloud_perception stack have been released!

We're slowly adding more functionality, fixing bugs, and writing documentation and tutorials for early adopters. Please check out http://www.ros.org/wiki/pcl for more information and don't forget to keep an eye on the tutorials section. PCL requires the latest branch, which is unstable and only recommended if you want to play with cutting edge features.

We are going to have two talks about PCL at ICRA (check out our schedule for details), so please stop by, and come talk to us afterwards. We're also going to showcase some of the PCL functionality at the Willow Garage booth. Looking forward to see you there!

Thanks to everyone that contributed!

point_cloud_perception change list

ROS 1.0.3 has been released! This is a patch update for users of Box Turtle. We recommend that all Box Turtle users upgrade to this new version. This update also includes new compatibility with the recent release of Ubuntu Lucid Lynx. Our debian packages are currently building and should be ready soon. rosinstall and SVN users can update now.

We appreciate all the ROS users who have contributed bug reports and patches that have made this release possible. The list of changes is below.

-- your friendly neighborhood ROS team

Change list

• rosmake patch to not try to clean rospack if ROS_NOBUILD present. r9156
• roslib: bug fix to roslib.list_stacks_by_path() when following symlinks (#2638)
• rxgraph: patch for xdot issue with certain dot files #2586 r9280
• rospy: fix to handle double shutdown signal case better #2369 r9348
• roslaunch: fixed name resolution of node command-line arguments and fixed usage statement #2309 r9361
• rosrecord: fixed bug in rosplay timeshifting #1327
• genmsg_cpp: fixed bug in string constant generation for rosjava, r9400.
• updated top-level rosdep.yaml to include Ubuntu Lucid definitions r9409

We've updated quick a few stacks in the past week. As you can tell from the dual 1.0.x and 1.1.x releases, we are moving forward on our C-Turtle development, though we are continuing to patch problems with Box Turtle as necessary.

• common 1.0.4
• common 1.1.2
• diagnostics 1.0.3
• diagnostics 1.1.0
• image_pipeline 1.0.3
• image_pipeline 1.1.4
• pr2_common_actions 0.1.5
• pr2_doors 0.2.10
• pr2_ethercat_drivers 1.0.4
• pr2_mechanism 1.0.4
• pr2_plugs 0.2.7
• pr2_power_drivers 1.0.4
• pr2_robot 0.3.10
• pr2_robot 0.4.3
• texas_drivers 0.2.12
• web_interface 0.3.19

Change lists

• common
• common
• diagnostics
• diagnostics
• image_pipeline
• image_pipeline
• pr2_common_actions
• pr2_doors
• pr2_ethercat_drivers
• pr2_mechanism
• pr2_plugs
• pr2_power_drivers
• pr2_robot
• pr2_robot
• texas_drivers
• web_interface

Several stacks have been updated, including the unstable ROS 1.1 series. Both joystick_drivers and laser_drivers have also started 1.1.x unstable development releases to test new features for C-Turtle.

• ros 1.1.4
• camera_drivers 0.9.3
• image_pipeline 1.0.2
• joystick_drivers 1.0.2
• joystick_drivers 1.1.0
• laser_drivers 1.0.5
• laser_drivers 1.1.0
• navigation 1.0.6
• pr2_apps 0.2.2
• pr2_common_actions 0.1.4
• pr2_ethercat_drivers 1.1.1
• pr2_plugs 0.2.6

Change lists

• ros
• camera_drivers
• image_pipeline
• joystick_drivers
• joystick_drivers
• laser_drivers
• laser_drivers
• navigation
• pr2_apps
• pr2_common_actions
• pr2_ethercat_drivers
• pr2_plugs

ROS 1.1.3 has been released as a minor update to the 1.1.2 release. This release fixes a minor issue with rosmake that affects shared installations of ROS.

ROS 1.1.2 has been released. This is an unstable release to test new features for ROS.

The major new feature with this release is integration of roslisp. roslisp is a full-featured Common Lisp client library for ROS that is being developed by Bhaskara Marthi (Willow Garage) and Lorenz Mösenlechner (TUM). We are now including it in the ROS stack to enable more easily access its capabilities, especially in shared install setups where ROS messages have already been built.

This update does not require ROS users to install Lisp. We have created a separate "roslisp_support" stack with a "roslisp_runtime" package that will trigger an install of SBCL, when required. Current users will have to make sure to add a dependency on the roslisp_runtime package so that installation scripts work properly.

Another major update in this release is performance updates for rospy message serialization. The new optimizations should result in performance improvement of 2x or better for many types of messages, mainly thank to James Bowman's patches.

As with our previous unstable releases, we ask that general users refrain from updating to this release unless they need to test integration for the upcoming C-turtle distribution. We do recommend that roslisp users test this new setup and provide feedback on this new roslisp core integration.

For more updates in this release, please see the full change list

-- your friendly neighborhood ROS team

ROS 1.0.2 has been released! This is a patch update for users of Box Turtle. We recommend that all Box Turtle users upgrade to this new version. Our debian packages are currently building and should be ready soon. rosinstall and SVN users can update now.

We appreciate all the ROS users who have contributed bug reports and patches that have made this release possible. The list of changes is below.

-- your friendly neighborhood ROS team

Links:

• ROS installation instruction
• Change list

visualization_common 1.1.0 and visualization 1.1.0 have been released. This is an unstable development release to try out features considered for inclusion in their 1.2 versions. visualization 1.0 will work with visualization_common 1.1, but visualization 1.1 requires visualization_common 1.1. The largest changes in these releases involve additions to the visualization_msgs/Marker API.

Change lists

• visualization_common
• visualization

The following stacks have been updated, including the brand-new topological_navigation research stack.

• image_pipeline 1.1.2
• imu_drivers 1.1.0
• pr2_power_drivers 1.0.3
• robot_model 1.0.2
• simulator_gazebo 1.0.5
• topological_navigation 0.1.0
• visualization 1.0.3
• vision_opencv 1.0.2

Change lists

• image_pipeline
• imu_drivers
• pr2_power_drivers
• robot_model
• simulator_gazebo
• topological_navigation
• visualization
• vision_opencv

navigation 1.1.0 has been released. This is an unstable development release to try out features considered for inclusion in navigation 1.2. The 1.1.0 release contains a service call for navfn that allows plans to be made via ROS, a service call to move_base that clears unknown space in the costmap, and a fix to velocity computation in the base_local_planner that could allow robots to drive a bit faster but needs testing to be sure its safe. Unless you have an immediate need for features in the 1.1 series, it is recommended that you use the 1.0 series until things stabilize with a 1.2 release.

Hope all is well,

Eitan

Change List:

• move_base
  • Added a clear_unknown_space service to move_base that allows external users to clear unknown space around the robot in the costmap.
• navfn
  • Adding a make_plan service to navfn that allows the use of the planner via ROS.
• costmap_2d
  • Changing ROS_ASSERT to ROS_FATAL with a std::runtime_error when checking for legal configurations.
  • Costmap2DROS is now const correct
• base_local_planner
  • Bug fix for how velocities were being computed. This fix will make the robot a bit more aggressive in how it drives and is going into the 1.1 series for testing.

The following stacks have been updated with patches:

• pr2_robot 0.3.8
• pr2_plugs 0.2.5
• pr2_web_apps 0.3.6
• point_cloud_perception 0.1.1
• simulator_gazebo 1.1.2

Change lists

• pr2_robot
• pr2_plugs
• pr2_web_apps
• point_cloud_perception
• simulator_gazebo

pr2_controllers 1.1.0 has been released. This is an unstable development release to try out features considered for inclusion in pr2_controllers 1.2. The 1.1.0 release contains some additional configuration options and a new joint trajectory controller with an action interface built in.

Change list

• The projector controller now updates the projector current setting each time through the realtime loop. Otherwise, some lockout conditions were causing the current to be set to zero, and it was never being reset to the proper value.
• pr2_controllers_msgs now autogenerates its action messages during build step. Removed the autogenerated files from version control
• pr2_gripper_action now depends explicitly on pr2_mechanism_model.
• Upped the tolerance for determining that a joint is stopped in the joint trajectory action to handle jittering in gazebo.
• Removed push_back from the realtime part of the calibration controllers (#3949)
• Made the stall velocity threshold configurable in pr2_gripper_action (#4073)
• Created the joint trajectory action controller, which combines the joint spline trajectory controller and the joint trajectory action.
• Upped tolerance for determining if the controller is following a different goal in the pr2_gripper_action (#4076)
• Joint trajectory action controller now accepts goals with a timestamp of 0 (#3896)

slam_gmapping 1.1.0 has been released. As with all 1.1.x stacks, this release is unstable and not recommend for most users. This release adds a couple of features that help with autonomous exploration.

This is a good time to put in patches and requests for features to be added in the 1.1.x series: https://code.ros.org/trac/ros-pkg/newticket

Change lists

• slam_gmapping

We've released several patch updates for our stacks. For Box Turtle, visualization and pr2_simulator has been updated. Several other development stacks have also been updated.

• pr2_simulator 1.0.3
• pr2_doors 0.2.8
• texas_drivers 0.2.10

• web_interface 0.3.16

• visualization 1.0.2

Change lists

• visualization
• pr2_simulator
• pr2_doors
• texas_drivers
• web_interface

The following stack have been updated:

• arm_navigation 0.2.2
• motion_planning_common 0.2.1
• pr2_arm_navigation 0.2.1
• texas_drivers 0.2.9
• trajectory_filters 0.2.2
• wifi_drivers 0.1.3

These updates are mostly compatibility fixes for ROS 1.1 and minor bug fixes.

Change lists

• arm_navigation
• motion_planning_common
• pr2_arm_navigation
• texas_drivers
• trajectory_filters
• wifi_drivers

ROS 1.1 has been released. This is an unstable development release to test and develop features for ROS 1.2. This comes quickly on the heals of the 1.1 release yesterday due to a bug in the new service generators. It also has some other miscellaneous changes.

Change list

• rosmaster: subscribers now declare topic types, though they cannot overriding existing type declarations (r8745)
• rosmaster: roslib.masterapi: Added getTopicTypes() to support subscribers declaring types (r8745)
• rospy: bug fix to on_shutdown() (#2536 r8746)
• rospy: removed support for deprecated /time topic
• rostopic: support for subscriber-declared types (uses new getTopicTypes()) Master method
• roslib: Links against rt to fix linking with the gold linker
• roscpp: Fixed service generators to work with concurrent builds

• roscpp: Removed support for deprecated /time topic

  -- your friendly neighborhood ROS development team

ROS 1.1 has been released. This is an unstable development release to test and develop features for ROS 1.2 (see version policy). Install at your own risk.

Major changes:

• C++: There are major changes to roscpp, including a new message serialization API, custom allocator support, subscription callback types, non-const subscriptions, and fast intraprocess message passing. These changes are backwards-compatible, but require further testing and API stabilization.

• Python: The rospy client library is largely unchanged, though the ROS Master has been moved to a separate package. There are many internal API changes being made to the Python code base to support the rosh scripting environment under active development.

For future development plans for the ROS 1.1.x branch, please see the ROS roadmap.

Please see the full changelist for a description of the many updates in this release.

Several stacks have transitioned to 1.1 unstable development branches: common_msgs 1.1.1, image_pipeline 1.1.0, and vision_opencv 1.1.0. These are unstable development releases: it is recommended for users to keep using the 1.0 branch in Box Turtle. Our stack version policy describes our general development model for stable and unstable releases.

common 1.1

The primary part of this release is the addition of the nodelet package. There was discussion on the ros-users mailing list earlier about how this can be used as an optimization. If you are interested please take a look at the documentation or code. Feedback is always appreciated.

image_pipeline 1.1

The major new features are in stereo_image_proc. It takes advantage of improvements to the OpenCV stereo block matcher, particularly to reduce fringe artifacts at edges. For comparison, the reference implementation of stereo block matching (on which OpenCV's was based) can be used instead, but they should now give roughly the same results. stereo_image_proc now advertises a separate point cloud topic using the new and improved PointCloud2 message type.

Change lists

• common_msgs
• image_pipeline
• vision_opencv

Several stacks have been updated with patches for Box Turtle.

• camera_drivers 0.9.2
• geometry 1.0.2
• laser_drivers 1.0.4
• vision_opencv 1.0.1
• web_interface 0.3.11

pr2_calibration, which is still in unstable development, was also updated to 0.3.0.

Change lists

• camera_drivers
• geometry
• laser_drivers
• pr2_calibration
• vision_opencv
• web_interface

There have been several new releases containing patches, new features, and unstable updates.

Two of our ROS stacks have gone to their "unstable" release cycle: common_msgs and vision_opencv. We will be using this release cycle to develop new features for the next stable release.

For our patch releases, web_interface and and laser_drivers have both been updated with bug fixes.

pr2_calibration, which is an unstable library still under active development, has reached it's 0.3.0 release.

• camera_drivers 0.9.2
• common_msgs 1.1.1
• laser_drivers 1.0.4
• pr2_calibration 0.3.0
• vision_opencv 1.1.0
• web_interface 0.3.11

Change lists

• camera_drivers
• common_msgs
• laser_drivers
• pr2_calibration
• vision_opencv
• web_interface

The following stacks have been updated with bug fixes:

• common 1.0.3
• image_transport_plugins 0.1.1
• pr2_ethercat_drivers 1.0.3
• web_interface 0.3.10

Change lists

• common
• image_transport_plugins
• pr2_ethercat_drivers
• web_interface

The ROS 1.0.1 patch update has been released. This contains several patches, but no API changes. If you are using ROS 1.0.0, it is recommended to update.

Change list

• rospy: fixed bug in service generator with transitive dependencies (#2378, r8077)
• roscpp
  • Fixed bug where XmlRpcValue parameters were accidentally being cached when they shouldn't be (#2381, r8089)
  • Fixed bug where param::get()/NodeHandle::getParam() of XmlRpcValue parameters would always return true after the first call, even if the parameter didn't exist (r8091)
  • Fixed a crash on shutdown involving popping off an already-empty list (r8132)
  • Fixed bug in UDPROS XML/RPC exchange so that the subscriber receives the publisher's side of the connection header information (r8265)
• rosmake
  • Fixed log directory permissions ticket
  • Fixed typo Exception/Exceptoin (#2377)
  • more verbose error on rosdep failure
• roswtf: removed reference to netifaces, which has been disabled (r8152)
• test_msgs: reworked layout to not confuse roswtf (r8154)
• rossrv/rosmsg: fixed issue with field type resolution (r8191)
• roslaunch: better error message on unrecognized tags inside of <node> tag (r8296) and better error message if another master is running (r8309)
• rostest: creation of .ros directory fixed to use parent permissions (r8303 r8304)
• roslisp message generation: added type specifiers for fields and made them immutable. If you update to ros 1.0.1, you also need to update in the ros_experimental repository.
• rostopic: bug fix to -p option when printing empty fields
• rosgraph: better suppression of /clock when using -q option with rxgraph
• roswtf: better error message when connection to master lost during graph checks (r8420)
• rosbuild:
  • Updated download_checkmd5.py to use hashlib instead of deprecated md5 (#2385, r8128)
  • Fixed bug with cached build flags when moving packages (#2459, r8453).
• rosdep.yaml: added missing Boost packages for Ubuntu 9.04
• rosdep : improved robustness to invalid packages (#2406, r8250).

driver_common 1.0.1 and sound_drivers 1.0.3 have been released. These are patch updates and updating is recommended.

• driver_common 1.0.1
• sound_drivers 1.0.3

Change lists

• driver_common
• sound_drivers

The navigation 1.0.4 patch update has been released. This release contains minor bug fixes and patches as documented in the change list below.

Change List

• move_base_msgs
  • Messages now automatically generated from a .action file instead of being manually generated and checked in
• navfn
  • Fixed a problem where debugging information was saved all the time. This was especially troublesome on the shared install on the robot where users don't have write permissions.
  • Fixed a bug in the validPointPotential method that could cause it to return false incorrectly
• map_server
  • Changed the map_saver to use a latched topic instead of a service call to get the map.
  • Fixed a bug where the map_saver would save unknown space with a color value that did not match the threshold it wrote out to its yaml file.

Hope all is well, Eitan

We've released patch updates to several stacks with bug fixes and minor updates.

• common 1.0.2
• geometry 1.0.1
• pr2_power_drivers 1.0.2
• visualization_common 1.0.1

Change lists

• common
• geometry
• pr2_power_drivers
• visualization_common

We've released several updates of ROS stacks. Most of these new releases are patch updates to fix various issues that have been reported.

Patch releases:

• common 1.0.1
• pr2_robot 0.3.4
• pr2_ethercat_drivers 1.0.2
• joystick_drivers 1.0.1
• navigation 1.0.2
• sound_drivers 1.0.2
• pr2_power_drivers 1.0.1
• web_interface 0.3.7
• visualization 1.0.1

Updates:

• pr2_calibration 0.2.0

Change lists:

• common
• pr2_robot
• pr2_ethercat_drivers
• joystick_drivers
• navigation
• sound_drivers
• pr2_power_drivers
• web_interface
• visualization
• pr2_calibration

Today we released pr2_controllers 1.0. This stack contains our realtime controllers for the PR2, as well as actionlib interfaces for invoking these controllers.

As you can tell, the pace of our 1.0 releases is slowing down... because we're almost done! If you're waiting for ROS 1.0, don't worry -- the ROS team happens to like releasing on Fridays.

There were several other releases today. These were mostly for stacks that are under development, but provide useful functionality to PR2 users. We'll be releasing videos showing what the future has in store for these stacks. We also released a minor update to pr2_common.

• pr2_calibration 0.1.2
• pr2_common 1.0.1
• web_interface 0.3.2
• pr2_web_apps 0.3.1

Change lists:

• pr2_calibration
• pr2_common
• web_interface

• pr2_web_apps

  -- your friendly neighborhood ROS team

Today we released pr2_gui 1.0. pr2_gui provides the pr2_dashboard, which is an integral tool we use for understanding the state of our PR2 robots.

We are busy putting the final touches on our remaining 1.0 releases. We releases several more stack updates today, including two new stacks: robot_calibration and pr2_calibration. Although these calibration stacks are not mature, yet, they are already proving very useful in calibrating our new PR2 Beta robots.

• camera_drivers 0.4.1
• robot_calibration 0.2.0
• pr2_calibration 0.1.1
• pr2_robot 0.2.2

Change lists:

• pr2_gui
• camera_drivers
• robot_calibration
• pr2_calibration

• pr2_robot

  -- your friendly neighborhood ROS team

Today was a big day for releasing drivers. Our 1.0 releases today were:

• driver_common
• laser_drivers
• pr2_common
• pr2_ethercat_drivers
• pr2_power_drivers

We are nearly finished with our 1.0 release cycle. With today's releases, most commonly used functionality with ROS has been released as 1.0, which means that non-PR2 robots using navigation and perception capabilities have a solid base to build on top of.

We also wanted to note that ROS 1.0 is in final testing. You can preview our release candidate at:

https://code.ros.org/svn/ros/stacks/ros/tags/rc/

driver_common provides common driver capabilities that we use in our laser and camera drivers, such as dynamic reconfiguration of parameters. Our laser_drivers stack provides drivers for common Hokuyo and SICK laser rangefinders. We also released pr2_ethercat_drivers and pr2_power_drivers, which support PR2-specific hardware.

Our non-driver release of the day was pr2_common 1.0, which contains description of the PR2 Beta robot, PR2-specific messages, and other common PR2 data.

We also released several other stacks today, including the new web_interface and pr2_web_apps stacks, which provide a user-friendly, browser-based environment for performing common robot tasks and monitoring.

• pr2_robot 0.2.0
• pr2_apps 0.2.0
• pr2_web_apps 0.3.0
• web_interface 0.3.0

Change lists:

• driver_common
• laser_drivers
• pr2_common
• pr2_ethercat_drivers
• pr2_power_drivers
• pr2_robot
• pr2_apps
• pr2_web_apps

• web_interface

  -- your friendly neighborhood PR2 drivers

Today we released two more stacks as 1.0, including the first of our PR2-related stacks as 1.0:

• pr2_mechanism
• image_pipeline

Several other PR2-related stacks have hit release candidate status for 1.0 and will be released in the coming days.

diagnostics has been updated 1.0.1 to patch a problem seen on Ubuntu distributions prior to Karmic. We also put out updates of several other stacks, including:

• pr2_gui 0.3.0
• driver_common 0.2.4
• laser_drivers 0.4.1
• pr2_common 0.3.1
• pr2_ethercat_drivers 0.2.2
• pr2_power_drivers 0.9.1
• pr2_simulator 0.3.0

Change lists:

• pr2_mechanism
• image_pipeline
• diagnostics
• pr2_gui
• driver_common
• laser_drivers
• pr2_common
• pr2_ethercat_drivers
• pr2_power_drivers
• pr2_simulator

Today, three of our driver-related stack reached 1.0 status:

• diagnostics
• imu_drivers
• joystick_drivers

These stacks provide drivers and diagnostic capability for the Microstrain 3DM-GX2 IMU, PS3 joystick, and the Linux joystick. There is also experimental support for the Wiimote and 3Dconnexion SpaceNavigator. The diagnostics stack also provides GUIs for viewing diagnostic information from these and other drivers.

We also had several more releases today to test features and bug fixes for coming 1.0 releases:

• pr2_mechanism 0.5.5
• pr2_ethercat_drivers 0.2.2
• laser_drivers 0.4.1

Next week, we will start to transition towards 1.0 releases of PR2-related components -- we hope you enjoyed today's unveiling of the PR2 Beta robots!

Change lists:

• diagnostics
• imu_drivers
• joystick_drivers
• pr2_mechanism
• pr2_ethercat_drivers

• laser_drivers

  -- your friendly neighborhood ROS drivers

Today we released three more stacks with 1.0 status:

• navigation
• slam_gmapping
• simulator_gazebo

This set of releases, combined with our previous release, provides the complete ROS navigation stack, including SLAM, with stable APIs and support. The navigation stack is in use on a wide variety of robots, and we're excited that this fundamental and robust capability has reached this milestone.

Additionally, the release of simulator_gazebo, which wraps the open-source Gazebo simulator, lays the groundwork for our upcoming release of the pr2_simulator stack.

Several stacks were released today to test functionality prior to 1.0 release. Many of our driver stacks are nearing 1.0 release, with both joystick_drivers and imu_drivers already in 1.0 release candidate status.

• joystick_drivers 0.5.0
• pr2_mechanism 0.5.4
• camera_drivers 0.3.2
• imu_drivers 0.4.0
• laser_drivers 0.4.0
• driver_common 0.2.3

Change lists:

• navigation
• slam_gmapping
• simulator_gazebo
• pr2_mechanism
• joystick_drivers
• camera_drivers
• imu_drivers
• laser_drivers

• driver_common

  -- your friendly neighborhood ROS packagers

navigation 0.8.1 has just been released. The primary purpose of this release is to move visualization topics into the namespace of the node instead of having them clutter the global namespace. This means that instead of rviz subscribing to local_costmap/obstacles to display obstacle information, it will instead subscribe to move_base_node_name/local_costmap/obstacles. For most people using the navigation stack, you won't have to change a thing, there are, however, a few exceptions to this:

1. If you subscribe to any of the visualization topics that move_base publishes, and your code lives outside the patched WG repository, you'll have to prepend the name of the move_base node onto those subscriptions. If you're using launch files from the Willow Garage repositories, that name will be "move_base_node." If you're using launch files from your own repositories that will be whatever name you decided to give the move_base node.

2. If you use the "make_plan" service provided by move_base, and your code lives outside the patched WG repository, you'll instead have to call "move_base_node/make_plan."

3. If you command the local version of move_base that operates in the odometric frame (found in 2dnav_pr2/move_base_local), and your code lives outside of the patched WG repository, you'll need to change from using local_navigation/move_base_simple/goal> to move_base_local_simple/goal.

I apologize in advance for any pain that these changes cause, but the global namespace was just getting too cluttered on our robots here at WG, and I don't expect that these changes will affect too many people. If you have any questions, concerns, or problems with the migration please don't hesitate to let me know.

Ok, that's the annoying part of this release. The exciting part of this release is its inclusion of SLAM support for the navigation stack. The costmaps now subscribe to the map as a latched topic instead of using a service call and support dynamic updates. This means, running SLAM with the navigation stack is easy, to see things in action follow these three steps:

1. Make sure you're running on the latest versions of the navigation and slam_gmapping stacks, and update in wg-ros-pkg
2. rosmake 2dnav_slam_stage
3. roslaunch 2dnav_slam_stage move_base_slam_5cm.launch (it may take a few seconds for the map to show up)

That's it, you should be able to send the robot goals in unknown space and it should build a map as it goes.

Hopefully, this release will just become navigation 1.0, but I'm going to give it the rest of the day to get some more testing in.

As always, let me know if you have any issues, questions, comments, concerns, etc.

Also, for those of you on OSX, nav_view has been patched so it should build and run correctly now.

• Full changelist
• Download

Hope all is well, Eitan

Today we added two more 1.0 releases:

• robot_model
• visualization

These releases mean that the rviz 3D visualization tool has officially reached 1.0 status. The visualization stack also recently added plugins for the ROS rxbag tool, which you will be able to use with the ROS 0.11 release. The robot_model stack is largely unchanged from its previous release.

Two other stacks also had releases today to do some final integration before they reach 1.0 status:

• navigation 0.8.0
• pr2_common 0.2.2

Change lists:

• robot_model
• visualization
• navigation

• pr2_common

  -- your friendly neighborhood ROS package stackers

We're glad to announce the first full release of geometry. The geometry stack provides important libraries in ROS, including the tf coordinate transform library, as well as ROS wrappers for the popular Bullet physics engine and KDL kinematics and dynamics library.

This release does mark the removal of several previously deprecated functions and methods. However, the APIs that are released are stable and the 1.0 series will be supported with patches in the upcoming ROS "Box Turtle" distribution.

Major Changes

Full changelist

• Lots of new documentation on the wiki at tf
• transform_sender has been replaced with static_transform_publisher, which has the same functionality.
• New helper functions in "tf/transform_datatypes.h" for working around Bullet deprecations
• New exception tf::InvalidArgument can be thrown for bad arguments. It inherits from tf::TransformException. This is used for things like unnormalized quaternions which would produce nan results.
• tf::remap() methods have been deprecated. Replace them with tf::resolve() or tf::TransformListener::resolve().
• Deprecated functions have been removed:
  • All tf::Stamped methods have been removed, there are drop in replacements supporting datatype tf::StampedTransform. This includes variants of lookupTransform(), data converter methods, setTransform(), and sendTransform()
  • tf::Stamped no longer has a child_frame_id field
  • MessageNotifier has been removed.
  • TransformListener::canTransform() with timeout has been removed, use waitForTransform() instead.
  • transformStampedTFToMsg()
  • transformStampedMsgToTF()
• The topic "/tf_message" is no longer valid. If you are using bag files it is recommended to rebag them remapping the topic to "/tf". Playback can be remapped each time with "/tf_message:=/tf" on the command line. Please see the full changelist for a migration script for bags.

Our 1.0 releases continue today with three new stacks hitting 1.0 status:

• geometry 1.0
• laser_pipeline 1.0
• simulator_stage 1.0

simulator_stage and laser_pipeline are largely unchanged from previous releases. geometry, in particular tf, has many changes worth noting, so they will be detailed in a separate announcement.

We are now a third of the way through our 1.0 release process and expect several more 1.0 releases this week.

Another major release today was pr2_controllers 0.3.0. That stack is now in our stable release process now that it has cleared user testing.

Several other stacks were released today in order to support the release process. With the exception of pr2_controllers, these were all patch updates. Although these releases contain new functionality and patches, we recommend waiting to update as many of these stacks will soon be reaching 1.0 status.

• navigation 0.6.5
• pr2_controllers 0.3.0
• pr2_ethercat_drivers 0.2.1
• pr2_gui 0.2.1
• pr2_simulator 0.2.8
• simulator_gazebo 0.6.11
• slam_gmapping 0.9.2

Change lists

• geometry
• laser_pipeline
• simulator_stage
• diagnostics
• laser_pipeline
• navigation
• pr2_controllers
• pr2_ethercat_drivers
• pr2_gui
• pr2_simulator
• simulator_gazebo
• slam_gmapping

-- your friendly neighborhood ROS distributors

To update on our ongoing process of 1.0 releases, two more stacks were released with the 1.0 label today:

• vision_opencv 1.0
• image_common 1.0

In order to prepare for upcoming 1.0 releases, many of the ROS stacks have been undergoing release updates to do final integration checks and ensure compatibility across stacks. We expect to see several more of these types of releases as we prepare release candidates for the remaining 1.0 stacks. Although these releases contain new functionality and patches, we recommend waiting to update as many of these stacks will soon be reaching 1.0 status. The new releases include:

• camera_drivers 0.3.1
• driver_common 0.2.2
• imu_drivers 0.3.1
• joystick_drivers 0.9.4
• laser_drivers 0.3.0
• pr2_simulator 0.2.7
• simulator_stage 0.10.2
• simulator_gazebo 0.6.10

There was also a minor update to physics_ode to add a dependency on the 'ros' stack:

• physics_ode 1.0.1

Here are links to the change lists:

• image_common
• vision_opencv
• camera_drivers
• driver_common
• imu_drivers
• joystick_drivers
• laser_drivers
• physics_ode
• pr2_simulator
• simulator_gazebo
• simulator_stage

We've just released diagnostics 0.5.0. We're moving towards final integration later this week. With this release, we added a few new features to the diagnostic_aggregator, and focused on our documentation and tutorials for the other components. We'd like to see our diagnostic toolchain used on more robots as ROS spreads.

For complete changes, plase see the complete changelist.

Major Changes

• diagnostic_aggregator
  • Added AnalyzerGroup class to group other Analyzers
  • Can discard stale diagnostic items
  • Analyzer function 'bool match(const string) const' is deprecated, new version is non-const.
• robot_monitor
  • Reports status of diagnostics_agg topic, helps debug network issues
  • User testing feedback incorporated
• diagnostic_updater, self_test
  • Deprecated functionality removed
  • Frequency status "errors" went to "warnings"

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/diagnostics/diagnostics-0.5.0.tar.bz2

image_pipeline-0.9.0 is now out. image_pipeline fills the gap between camera_drivers and higher-level vision processing. It includes a camera calibration GUI, a lightweight viewer for image topics, and nodes to perform color interpolation, rectification and stereo processing on camera images.

This is a stable release and has passed our user testing requirements. For changes see the changelist below. This release finally removes much long-deprecated code. In particular, the old stereoproc node is gone, as are all of the stereo messages excepting DisparityImage (which has a new definition).

Changes

image_proc:

• Raw images may now be 8-bit mono, RGB, BGR, or any of the four bayer encodings.
• Now using OpenCV for bayer interpolation.
• Now using image_geometry for rectification.
• Better error reporting when started in global namespace or input topics do not exist.

stereo_image_proc:

• Inherited improvements from image_proc.
• Now using OpenCV's block matching implementation to calculate the disparity image.
• Parameters have changed to more closely follow OpenCV's options.
• Publishing floating-point disparity image.
• No longer publishing image_disparity, use stereo_view for visualization instead.
• REMOVED deprecated stereoproc node and other obsolete files.

image_view:

• stereo_view shows color-mapped disparity image along with left/right.

stereo_msgs:

• New definition of DisparityImage. Disparities are now floating-point, not fixed-point. Better comments.
• REMOVED all deprecated messages (RawStereo, DisparityInfo, StereoInfo).
• Added split_rawstereo.py script to convert RawStereo bags to Image & CameraInfo bags.

camera_calibration:

• GUI improvements.

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/image_pipeline/image_pipeline-0.9.0.tar.bz2

laser_drivers 0.3.0 has been released. This release is intended to test final changes in anticipation of an upcoming 1.0 release.

Changes

• Adjusted messages so that the driver will not spew messages when it manages to open a device but fails to get all the way running.
• Updated licenses and package/stack descriptions.
• Removed the node description from doxygen.

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/laser_drivers/laser_drivers-0.3.0.tar.bz2

visualization 0.5.0 has been released. This release includes the new rxbag_plugins package, which provides visualization plugins for the new-in-ROS-0.11 rxbag tool, as well as a number of rviz bugfixes.

Changes

• Fixed crash when loading old configs that had a top-down orthographic view (r26030, #3358)
• Fixed Marker display memory leak which caused rviz to constantly increase in memory usage in certain situations (r26166, #3364)
• Now validates input messages and discards those with nans/infs (r26286, #3360)
• Fixed "Panels" menu checkboxes to be correct at startup instead of all-checked (r26611)
• Fixed crash caused by laser scans/point clouds arriving in their separate thread and accidentally causing a GUI change in that thread instead of the GUI thread (r26639, #3422)
• Added rxbag_plugins which contains message viewer plugins for the rxbag visualization tool

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/visualization/visualization-0.5.0.tar.bz2

ROS 0.11 has been released! ROS 0.11 includes many of the final features and API modifications that we wish to have in place for ROS 1.0. Our focus with this release was on improving consistency, better performance, and bug fixes. We are also removing much of the deprecated functionality with this release so that ROS 1.0 will have minimal deprecated functionality.

Some of the major updates in this release include new "wait for message" API routines in roscpp and rospy, bash tab-completion for most command-line tools, improvement in Python-related startup latency, and streamlining of the service API in rospy.

There were many other changes with this release as we work to improve and finalize the ROS feature set. You can find a complete list in the changelist.

You can download a tarball of the release, though we recommend that you start with the ROS installation instructions instead.

Notes on Updating from 0.10 or earlier in SVN: There are a number of previously installed programs which are now versioned scripts. SVN will error when updating and not delete the installed programs to add the scripts in their place. You will need to delete the program and svn up again. The error will read:

svn: Failed to add file 'FILENAME': an unversioned file of the same name already exists

The solution is to rm FILENAME && svn up again.

driver_common 0.2.1 has been released. This is a patch release to fix a bug in dynamic_reconfigure introduced by changes in method names in 0.2.0.

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/driver_common/driver_common-0.2.1.tar.bz2

camera_drivers 0.3.0 has been released.

Changes

• The packages dcam1394 and libdc1394v2 have been moved into camera_drivers_experimental. These packages are not yet considered stable and will likely change before the release of a stable driver for firewire cameras.
• Bug fix: fix import of dynamic_reconfigure

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/camera_drivers/camera_drivers-0.3.0.tar.bz2

We have released several more stacks into our stable release process: driver_common 0.2.0, imu_drivers 0.2.0, camera_drivers 0.2.0, and laser_drivers 0.2.0. We have also released image_pipeline 0.1.1, which will soon be in stable release as well. These stacks contain drivers for publicly available sensors, such as Hokuyo and SICK laser range finders, firewire cameras, and the microstrain 3dmgx2 IMU.

With these releases, all driver-related components for our Milestone 3 effort are now stable. This means that feature development for these components is largely concluded for this release cycle and that every effort will be made to ensure that future modifications to the public APIs in these stacks will be done in a backwards-compatible manner.

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/driver_common/driver_common-0.2.0.tar.bz2
• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/laser_drivers/laser_drivers-0.2.0.tar.bz2
• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/imu_drivers/imu_drivers-0.2.0.tar.bz2
• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/camera_drivers/camera_drivers-0.2.0.tar.bz2
• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/image_pipeline/image_pipeline-0.1.1.tar.bz2

We have released several more stacks into our stable release process: pr2_common 0.2.0, pr2_gui 0.2.0, pr2_ethercat_drivers 0.2.0, pr2_power_drivers 0.2.0, and pr2_mechanism 0.5.0. These releases mainly affect users of the PR2 robot, including the PR2 simulator. Each of these stacks now has a stable API, which means that every effort will be made to provide backwards-compatiblity for any changes.

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/pr2_common/pr2_common-0.2.0.tar.bz2
• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/pr2_gui/pr2_gui-0.2.0.tar.bz2
• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/pr2_ethercat_drivers/pr2_ethercat_drivers-0.2.0.tar.bz2
• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/pr2_mechanism/pr2_mechanism-0.5.0.tar.bz2
• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/pr2_power_drivers/pr2_power_drivers-0.2.0.tar.bz2

navigation 0.6.3 has been released. This release contains the standard bug fixes and patches and also adds some features to the costmap_2d package that begin to make it more compatible with SLAM systems. There is still a bit of work/testing to be done to allow easy integration of the navigation stack with a SLAM system, but look for the next few releases of navigation stack to add additional capabilities, culminating with the 0.7.0 release of the stack. I'm planning on getting the 0.7.0 release out sometime in mid to late January. In the meantime, please treat the additions to the costmap_2d package as experimental as they are fairly untested.

Changes

• Removed use of deprecated rosbuild macros.

fake_localization

• Added API for having a map coordinate frame that is different from the simulator coordinate frame.

robot_pose_ekf

• Fix bug where nodehandle.getParam was used instead of nodehandle.pararm
• fix test launch files to have names as required for ROS 0.11

costmap_2d

• The costmap now publishes information about what cells are unknown
• Fixed a bug where the voxel version of the costmap was not retaining unknown space correctly when reset to the static map.
• Built support for changing maps into the Costmap and Costmap2DROS objects. See the updateStaticMap method of the Cosmtap2DROS object.
• Added support for copying only a window of a costmap. See the getCostmapWindowCopy method of the Costmap2DROS object.
• Changed the default value for the min_obstacle_height parameter to be 0.0m from 0.05m.

navfn

• Added a parameter that allows the user to configure whether or not navfn should consider unknown space as traversible.
• Updated navfn to work with costmaps of changing size

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/navigation/navigation-0.6.3.tar.bz2

image_common 0.6.1 has been released. This is a patch release to fix compilation under gcc 4.4.

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/image_common/image_common-0.6.1.tar.bz2

laser_pipeline 0.6.0 has been released. There are only a few small changes with this release.

Changes

laser_geometry

• Adding support for inverted mode to laser projection
• Removed use of deprecated rosbuild macros.

laser_assembler

• Removed use of deprecated rosbuild macros.

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/laser_pipeline/laser_pipeline-0.6.0.tar.bz2

simulator_gazebo 0.6.4 has been released. This is a patch release fixing a camera plugin bug where distortion parameters (k1,k2,k3,t1,t2) were not passed from Gazebo URDF extensions XML to the subsequently published CameraInfo message (D-matrix remained 0).

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/simulator_gazebo/simulator_gazebo-0.6.4.tar.bz2

image_common 0.6.0 has been released.

There is one deprecation: creating an image_transport::SubscriberFilter now requires an image_transport::ImageTransport argument in place of a ros::NodeHandle. The constructor/subscribe() taking ros::NodeHandle will be removed in a later release.

image_transport::Subscriber now attempts to detect a common user error, passing in a transport-specific topic name (e.g. "/camera/image/compressed") in place of the base topic ("camera/image"), and print a useful warning.

Other changes are mostly bugfixes and making image_transport's publisher/subscriber classes more closely mimic the behavior of ros::Publisher and ros::Subscriber in edge cases.

Changes

image_transport:

• Subscriber attempts to recognize and warn when the user passes in a transport-specific topic instead of the base topic.
• ImageTransport constructor from NodeHandle is now explicit.
• SubscriberFilter takes an ImageTransport argument in constructor and subscribe(). Old versions with a NodeHandle argument are deprecated.
• (Camera)Publisher and (Camera)Subscriber methods now mimic roscpp behavior when the object is "invalid" (default-constructed or shutdown).
• Publisher plugin parameter lookup correctly starts in the namespace defined by the base topic.

camera_calibration_parsers:

• Added stream-based read/write functions for INI and YML representations.

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/image_common/image_common-0.6.0.tar.bz2

geometry 0.4.5 has been released. This is a patch release. The changes are listed below.

Changes

tf

• new node tf_remap which will remap tf frames. Useful for bag file playback etc.
• added experimental lookupVelocity method
• Fix: Python methods lookupTransform and lookupTransformFull were failing on Python 2.6 (r25958,#3337)
• Switch tf_prefix to use searchParam() #2921
• Removed use of deprecated rosbuild macros
• Python methods transformVector3Stamped added r26189

angles

• Removed use of deprecated rosbuild macros

kdl

• create symbolic link called site-packages to dist-packages for compatibility with newer python versions

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/geometry/geometry-0.4.5.tar.bz2

simulator_gazebo 0.6.3 has been released. This release adds bayer image generation in simulation for modeling wide stereo camera pair on PR2.

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/simulator_gazebo/simulator_gazebo-0.6.3.tar.bz2

pr2_simulator 0.1.1 has been released and contains a minor patch to startup a set of default controllers when starting PR2 in simulation. This is going to be the default behavior for the actual PR2 as well. Please see the ChangeList for more details.

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/pr2_simulator/pr2_simulator-0.1.1.tar.bz2

The pr2_simulator 0.1 has been released. This initial release represents a transition into a stable release cycle. Future updates to this stack will be made backwards compatible, when possible. The pr2_simulator stack contains the necessary components for working with a simulated PR2.

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/pr2_simulator/pr2_simulator-0.1.0.tar.bz2

simulator_gazebo 0.6.2 has been released. This release contains a parallel make bug fix and (re)enables erratic_gazebo 2dnav-stack demo.

Change List

• fixes to gazebo_ros_diffdrive for the erratic example. publishing '''erratic_odometry/odom''' topic and tf transform from '''base_link''' to '''odom''' frame.
• fix parallel build error due to dependency bug #3349

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/simulator_gazebo/simulator_gazebo-0.6.2.tar.bz2

simulator_gazebo 0.6.1

simulator_gazebo 0.6.1 has been released with some patches to fix bugs in include guards. This release adds custom callback queue for the remaining of the plugins in gazebo plugins except for sim time publisher. GazeboRosF3D plugin now broadcasts both force and torque acting on a body using the WrenchStamped message.

Other changes:

• removed joint force plugin

robot_model 0.6.4

We just released the 0.6.4 version of the robot model stack. Much like the last release of simulator_gazebo 0.6.1, this release changes how we deal with the world link in a tree. The robot state publisher no longer ignores the world link when it publishes to tf. The urdf package also got a visualizer tool to visualize the robot tree.

Other changes:

• urdf
  • add visualizer tool for urdf tree
  • root link is always optional, not only when it is called "world"
  • fix bug where sphere init always fails
• robot_state_publisher
  • Also publish the transform from the root link to its children
  • Only warn once when the tree that is provided contains fewer than two segments.
• kdl_parser
  • add check_kdl_parser tool to verify parsing of urdf file
• convex_decomposition:
  • add unzip as dependency

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/common/robot_model-0.6.4.tar.bz2
• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/simulator_gazebo/simulator_gazebo-0.6.1.tar.bz2

In conjunction with the ROS 0.10 release, several ROS stacks have been released with compatibility updates and other changes.

common 0.7.1

The common 0.7.1 patches several issues with xacro:

• Added a flag for only evaluating include tags in xacro
• Allowing multiple blocks and multiple insert_blocks, fixing #3322 and #3323

common_msgs 0.9.6

common_msgs 0.9.6 contains a new sensor_msgs/SetCameraInfo service and updates to nav_msgs/OccupancyGrid.

• nav_msgs:
  • Changed nav_msgs/OccupancyGrid to use int8 instead of deprecated byte (no code changes necessary it was an alias)
  • Updated migration rules to handle migration of nav_msgs/OccupancyGrid since md5sum changed.
• sensor_msgs: Added service sensor_msgs/SetCameraInfo
• Removed improperly added srv directory in root of stack.

geometry 0.4.4

The geometry 0.4.4 release patches several issues with tf and upgrades the version of eigen to 2.0.9:

• tf: fixed usage of python to_seconds to to_sec
• tf: fixed commandline parsing in view_frames for hudson build
• tf: fixed ~ param usage in change_notifier
• eigen: Upgraded to version 2.0.9

visualization 0.4.1

This is a minor patch release that fixes parsing orientation out of a URDF (thanks Lorenz).

simulator_stage 0.10.0

With the simulator_stage 0.10.0 release, robot link base_laser has been changed to base_laser_link to stay consistent with naming conventions of all other PR2 robot links (except frames). Please note that you will need wg-ros-pkg trunk r26633+ to work with this release.

simulator_gazebo 0.6.0

With the simulator_gazebo 0.6.0 release, the main API change is that the urdf2gazebo converter tool does not skip the first link if it's not the special "world"-link. Other changes in this release:

• added custom callback queues for imu, p3d, bumper, camera, laser plugins
• fix bumper, publish once per update call
• change fixed axis pseudo-hinge joint to z-axis for better stability (heuristics)
• support removal of world link from urdf

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/common/common-0.7.1.tar.bz2
• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/common_msgs/common_msgs-0.9.6.tar.bz2
• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/geometry/geometry-0.4.4.tar.bz2
• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/visualization/visualization-0.4.1.tar.bz2
• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/simulator_stage/simulator_stage-0.10.0.tar.bz2
• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/simulator_gazebo/simulator_gazebo-0.6.0.tar.bz2

In conjunction with the ROS 0.10 release, several ROS stacks have been released with compatibility updates and other changes.

common 0.7.0

The common 0.7.0 release introduces experimental python versions of both the ActionServer and SimpleActionServer. The API for the code mirrors that of the stable C++ code, so you should expect a fair amount of stability at the API level there, but the code is only lightly tested so there are bound to be some bugs to flush out. This release also fixes a number of deprectation warnings introduced by ROS 0.10.0.

• Adding a blocking call for sending goals (actionlib::SimpleActionClient::sendGoalAndWait). This feature is still unstable & experimental
• Added a shutdown method to the actionlib::SimpleActionServer allowing users to explicitly tell the server to shutdown
• No longer relying on header.stamp fields to autofill with ros::Time::now() (in both C++ and Python).
• Fixed race condition in C++ client causing spurious "Tried to create a handle to a list elem with refcount 0" errors
• Created a Python action server and simple action server, mirroring the functionality of the C++ [simple] action server. This feature is still unstable & experimental.
• Adding explicit copy constructor and equals operator to ServerGoal

navigation 0.6.2

navigation 0.6.2 is a patch release that has some minor bug fixes and gets rid of deprecation warnings that came along with ROS 0.10.0. There is also a patch to robot_post_ekf that fixex a crash when the covariance is zero.

simulator_stage 0.9.1

The simulator_stage 0.9.1 release switches simulator time message type from roslib::Time to roslib::Clock.

simulator_gazebo 0.5.0

The simulator_gazebo 0.5.0 release has some minor bug fixes and switches simulator time message type from roslib::Time to roslib::Clock. Additionally:

• player CMake variable fix https://code.ros.org/trac/ros-pkg/ticket/3290
• reworked contact feedback messages.
• fix LD_LIBRARY_PATHs for setup.tcsh and setup.bash

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/common/common-0.7.0.tar.bz2
• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/navigation/navigation-0.6.2.tar.bz2
• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/simulator_stage/simulator_stage-0.9.1.tar.bz2
• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/simulator_gazebo/simulator_gazebo-0.5.0.tar.bz2

robot_model 0.6.3 has been released. This release fixes a number of bugs in the 0.6.2 stable release. The changes are limited to the urdf and kdl_parser pacakges.

Changes

• kdl_parser

  • Fix bug where kdl parser was not using inertia from urdf
  • Add regression test for inertia parsing

• urdf

  • Make all "get" methods const
  • Give better error message when no links were found
  • Generate parse error when visual, collision or inertial is specified but fails to parse

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/robot_model/robot_model-0.6.3.tar.bz2

ROS 0.10 has been released. The focus of this release is preparing ROS for a 1.0 release. We have been making final reviews of the ROS APIs to address any essential feature gaps, API inconsistencies, and deprecations. Documentation is also being improved and reviewed. Final deprecations prior to 1.0 are described on the roadmap and are either being made in this release or 0.11.

There were many other changes with this release as we work to improve and finalize the ROS feature set. You can find a complete list in the changelist.

You can download a tarball of the release, though we recommend that you start with the ROS installation instructions instead.

simulator_gazebo 0.4.2 has been released. The 0.4.2 releases contains patches for some additional bug fixes as mentioned in the change list: urdf2gazebo had a gimbal lock problem, joint axis transforms were missing and new model spawning tool. "gazebo_model" has been added, due to replace "spawn_gazebo_model".

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/simulator_gazebo/simulator_gazebo-0.4.2.tar.bz2

simulator_gazebo 0.3.0 has been released. This release contains patches for bug fixes as mentioned in the change list. Consolidation from other packages and some cleaning up were done for the default worlds and object models in gazebo_worlds. ROS time publisher for simulation time has been moved from PR2 robot description into the world. Non-PR2 specific Gazebo plugins from the unreleased pr2_simulator stack (originally under package pr2_gazebo_plugins) has been migrated into the simulator_gazebo stack under a new package named gazebo_plugins. Most/all of the changes should be transparent to end-users.

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/simulator_gazebo/simulator_gazebo-0.3.0.tar.bz2

navigation 0.6.1 has been released. This is a patch release that fixes some bugs unearthed in the process of making sure the move_base node passes valgrind cleanly.

Minor Updates

• costmap_2d: Added an example launch file that is up-to-date

Bug Fixes

• nav_core: Destructors of the interfaces weren't virtual, causing all sorts of memory problems on shutdown of nodes. This is now fixed.
• rotate_recovery: Added missing cleanup of a pointer on destruction.
• move_base: Switched action server to be a pointer to avoid a race condition that will be fixed in trunk of common, but can be worked around.
• move_base: Ran valgrind on the move_base node and got it passing cleanly.

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/navigation/navigation-0.6.1.tar.bz2

geometry 0.4.3 has just been released. This is a patch release. One assert was replaced with in code error handling and one function has been deprecated in favor of using a constructor inline (see below) .

Changes

tf

• waitForTransform removed Assert, errors are now reported using return code and error string.
• Deprecating sendTransform(tf::Transform, . . . ) due to backwards argument order. Replace call with sendTransform(tf::StampedTransform. . . ) Also fixing regression in 0.4.1 in that function.
  • b.sendTransform(transform, time, frameid, parentid); becomes b.sendTransform(tf::StampedTransform(transform, time, parentid, frameid));

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/geometry/geometry-0.4.3.tar.bz2

navigation 0.6.0 has just been released. This release makes the recovery behaviors the navigation stack invokes when planning fails plugin based. This means that users of the move_base node now have the flexibility to write recovery behaviors that are appropriate for their robot. Documentation on how to configure the navigation stack to use these plugins can be found here, and two example recovery behaviors can be found here and here. These changes are all backwards compatible, so if you've been satisfied with the default recovery behaviors, they'll contiunue to work as they have in the past.

Full Changelist

New Features

• move_base: Made the recovery behaviors that the navigation stack uses plugins so that users of the move_base node have more flexibility in how the robot behaves when planning fails. All the changes to the navigation stack are backwards compatible.
• clear_costmap_recovery: Added this recovery behavior as a default plugin for the move_base node. Also, this package was API and Doc reviewed.
• rotate_recovery: Added this recovery behavior as a default plugin for the move_base node. Also, this package was API and Doc reviewed.
• nav_core: Added a !RecoveryBehavior interface and updated documentation accordingly.
• voxel_grid: Added a few more tests for the voxel_grid package.

Bug Fixes

• costmap_2d: Fixed build failure on Karmic/gcc4.4

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/navigation/navigation-0.6.0.tar.bz2

visualization 0.4.0 has been released. This release is heavily focused on usability, and specifically on being able to easily debug what is going wrong when data is not showing up. The largest change in this regard is the addition of status elements in the "Displays" tree. These should show you if something is going wrong and attempt to heuristically diagnose what the problem is.

There are also a number of other changes, such as help text for each item in the displays tree.

The per-display documentation has also been filled out for all built-in displays, with video and property descriptions.

Full Changelist

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/visualization/visualization-0.4.0.tar.bz2

image_common-0.5.2 has been released. This is a patch release with bug fixes and gcc 4.4 support; usage has not changed.

Changes

• image_transport:
  • Fixed bug in connection callbacks that sometimes caused a segfault.
  • Publisher now throws if it fails to load any plugins.
  • Got rid of deprecation warning from getSubscriberCallerID.
• camera_calibration_parsers:
  • Fix for gcc 4.4.

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/image_common/image_common-0.5.2.tar.bz2

We've released diagnostics 0.3.0. This release is the first stable release for the diagnostic_aggregator and includes numerous bug fixes for the robot_monitor and other tools. The runtime_monitor monitor tool was renamed from "wxmonitor.py" to "monitor.py", so you should now invoke it with rosrun runtime_monitor monitor.py.

Changes

• diagnostic_aggregator
  • GenericAnalyzer has been completely redone, with subclassable base GenericAnalyzerBase
  • New OtherAnalyzer handles remaining diagnostic messages
  • API change for Analyzers, fully API reviewed
  • Stable API, all changes will have deprecation period from now on
  • Updated doxygen
  • Removed xmlrpc++ dependency
  • Regression test
• robot_monitor
  • Fixed "has_message" function for pr2_dashboard
  • Fixed annoying scrolling behavior
  • Basic regression test (smoke test)
• runtime_monitor: Basic regression tests added (smoke test)
• diagnostic_analysis: renamed from "diagnostics_analysis" for consistency with other diagnostic packages.
• diagnostic_updater/self_test: Minor documentation fixes and features. API review will be complete in 0.4.0.

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/diagnostics/diagnostics-0.3.0.tar.bz2

physics_ode 0.2.0 and simulator_gazebo 0.2.0 have been released. physics_ode provides a rigid body physics engine for the open source Open Dynamics Engine (ODE). simulator_gazebo is a ROS wrapper for the open source Gazebo simulator (part of Player/Stage/Gazebo project). This stack also includes tools for interfacing with the simulator and a set of commonly used sample worlds and objects.

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/physics_ode/physics_ode-0.2.0.tar.bz2
• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/simulator_gazebo/simulator_gazebo-0.2.0.tar.bz2

geometry 0.4.1 and common 0.6.1 have been released. This is a patch release. If you are having performance issues are wish to use these stacks with gcc 4.4 (e.g. Karmic Koala), please update.

Minor Changes

• tf
  • patched TransformBroadcaster.sendTransform(*) methods to consistently remap
  • Fixed tf_monitor display of current chain to show last link
  • MessageFilter now remaps target frames (r25194, #3119)
  • MessageFilter now warns and immediately throws out messages with an empty frame_id (r25194)
  • Changed compile mode to Release from Debug r25374
  • Fixed usage message for static_transform_sender r25375
• common
  • Koala/gcc 4.4 compatability.
  • filters patch for karmic compilation

Downloads

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/geometry/geometry-0.4.1.tar.bz2
• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/common/common-0.6.1.tar.bz2

navigation 0.5.2 is a patch release that adds new tests and fixes a bug with a costmap_2d test.

New Features

• voxel_grid: Added some basic tests, more to come soon
• costmap_2d: Added a lot of tests
  

Bug Fixes

• costmap_2d: Fixing test dependency on willow_maps which is not in the navigation stack

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/navigation/navigation-0.5.2.tar.bz2

vision_opencv 0.3.0 has been released. The new stack vision_opencv is a replacement for the old stack opencv. The stack opencv is now deprecated, as are its packages opencv_latest and opencvpython.

Please update your dependencies as follows: if your manifest.xml has opencv_latest, then replace it with opencv2 and cv_bridge. If you have scripts or launch files that reference opencv_latest, change to opencv2.

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/vision_opencv/vision_opencv-0.3.0.tar.bz2

robot_model 0.6.1 has been released. This release fixes a number of bugs in the 0.6.0 stable release. The most important fixes are in the urdf package: the parser now makes sure all required fields are present, and the parser now always fails when it finds a syntax error in a field, even when this field is optional. See the changelist below for more details.

Changes

• robot_state_publisher:
  • Remove use of deprecated "~" in parameter names.
  • Add include of for g++ 4.4 compatibility
  • Fix warnings in regression tests
  • Increase buffer size for joint state from 1 to 500
  • Deal with an incomplete joint state by trimming corresponding tree branches
• resource_retriever:
  • Add include of for g++ 4.4 compatibility
• urdf:
  • Fix bugs in optional/required checks of fields
  • Fail parsing if optional field has invalid syntax

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/robot_model/robot_model-0.6.1.tar.bz2

navigation 0.5.1 is a patch release that adds new tests and fixes a bug with a costmap_2d test.

New Features

• amcl: Updating amcl so that the coordinate frames it uses can be set via parameters
• costmap_2d: Can now save pgm files of the costmap to help with debugging if the user desires
• costmap_2d: Added test to catch invalid costmap construction or updating due to improper raytracing or inflation
  

Bug Fixes

• costmap_2d: Fixed a bug in obstacle re-inflation after raytracing
• robot_pose_ekf: Update bag downloading and fix assert in regression test exit
• base_local_planner: The local plan published by the planner for visualization purposes now includes orientation information
• Fixed CMake deprecation warnings across all packages
  

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/slam_gmapping/slam_gmapping-0.5.2.tar.bz2
• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/navigation/navigation-0.5.2.tar.bz2

ROS 0.9 has been released! Our focus with this release was bringing ROS closer to 1.0 status. ROS has been undergoing user testing as part of our Milestone 3 efforts, which has allowed us to make improvements to numerous tools, clarify error messages, and fix bugs. The most notable change with this release is that we have officially ended support for the deprecated ros::Node API in roscpp. We have also introduced a new "bool" type for ROS message types.

There were many other changes with this release as we work to improve and finalize the ROS feature set. You can find a complete list in the changelist.

You can download a tarball of the release, though we recommend that you start with the ROS installation instructions instead.

image_common-0.5.0 has been released. This release removes all APIs deprecated in 0.2.0. The remaining APIs are stable. If you are still using ImagePublisher or ImageSubscriber, take a minute to update your code; see image_transport's Quickstart Guide or Tutorials for proper usage.

This is the first release to pass documentation review.

Changes

• image_transport:
  • Removed all deprecated functions and classes.
  • Fixed compilation bugs in ImageTransport::subscribeCamera().
  • Improved output from list_transports.
• camera_calibration_parsers:
  • Removed deprecated functions.

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/image_common/image_common-0.5.0.tar.bz2

common-0.6.0 has been released. This is mostly a maintenance update to do the planned removal of the yaml-cpp package in favor of the yaml_cpp package introduced in 0.5.0. Below is the full changelist.

Major changes

• yaml-cpp has been removed (use yaml_cpp instead)

Minor changes * actionlib * Removing deprecated version of SimpleActionClient::sendGoal. This only affects users who register a doneCallback when calling sendGoal * Shortened names of the python and C++ SimpleActionClient wait* calls * Switched internal references of deprecated ros::SingleSubscriberPublisher::getSubscriberCallerID to getSubscriberName * Shortened wait* method names in the python action client * waitForActionServerToStart and waitForGoalToFinish are now waitForServer and waitForResult. #3059 * Moved actionlibtutorials out of common and into rospkgtutorials * xacro * Added xacro.cmake file that exports new xacroaddxacrofile() macro, #3020

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/common/common-0.6.0.tar.bz2

geometry-0.4.0 has been released. The main new feature in this release is an optional callback that has been added for when messages are dropped by the tf::MessageFilter. Debugging messages have also been updated for greater readability.

Major Changes

• Make the error messages that tf prints more user friendly.
• Add a failure callback to tf::MessageFilter

Minor Changes

• bug fix: message notifier should listen to '/tf' and '/tf_message' topics.
  

Downloads

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/geometry/geometry-0.4.0.tar.bz2
  

navigation 0.5.0 has just been released. All packages in the navigation stack have now reached "doc review" status, which means that end-user documentation for all appropriate APIs has been documented and peer reviewed. Those wishing to use the navigation stack on their own robots are encouraged to use this release as the APIs are both stable and documented for us.

• base_local_planner: Added "y_vels" parameter to allow holonomic robot users to control the y velocities that their robot will explore
• All packages in the stack have passed documentation reviews
  

• robot_pose_ekf: Make parent-child tags in internal buffer consistent. Update to new tf::StampedTransform data type.
• costmap_2d: Fixed many deprecation warnings resulting from new release of geometry stack
• base_local_planner: Fixed many deprecation warnings resulting from new release of geometry stack
• move_base: Fixed many deprecation warnings resulting from new release of geometry stack
  

• base_local_planner: The min_vel_th, max_vel_th, and min_in_place_vel_th parameters have now been removed, update to max_rotational_vel and min_in_place_rotational_vel
• costmap_2d The "inscribed_radius" and "circumscribed_radius" parameters have now been removed, switch to the "robot_radius" parameter or the "footprint" parameter.
  

• costmap_2d: Fixed clearing the robot footprint of obstacles for circular robots.

• All the tutorials for the navigation stack have moved to the ros_pkg_tutorials stack.
  

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/navigation/navigation-0.5.0.tar.bz2

robot_model 0.6.0 has been released. This is the first "stable" release of the robot model stack. This release removed the last pieces of deprecated functionality in urdf and kdl_parser.

Changes

• Removed deprecated functionality from urdf:
  • parent_link shared pointer of link is removed
  • dom_parser is removed
  • treeFromRobotModel is removed
• The resource_retriever got new tutorials.
• The robot_model stack is documentation-reviewed.

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/robot_model/robot_model-0.6.0.tar.bz2

I am announcing the release of the robot_model.0.5.0. stack. The functionality of the kdl parser that was deprecated in the 0.3.0 release is removed in this release. To fix a memory leak in the urdf package, accessing the parent of a Link has changed, but this release maintains backwards compatibility.

Changes

• Removed deprecated functionality form Kdl parser:
  • xml_parser is removed
• Deprecated in urdf:
  • linkparent member variable in Link class is deprecated and replaced by the getParent() method. Once the linkparent member variable is completely removed (in the next release) the memory leak Ticket #2680 will be fixed.

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/robot_model/robot_model-0.5.0.tar.bz2

common-0.5.0 has been released. There is one major change. The yaml-cpp package is being renamed yaml_cpp. For backwards compatability the old version of yaml-cpp will remain in the system until the next release which is targeted for next Wednesday.

Porting to the new package only requires changing the dependency in the manifest. Everything else is the same.

Major changes

• yaml-cpp renamed to yaml_cpp as dashes are not allowed in package names

Minor changes

• actionlib
  • Deprecating SimpleActionClient's getTerminalState() and getGoalState(). Replaced by getState()
  • SimpleActionClient's SimpleDoneCallback now provides a SimpleClientGoalState argument instead of a TerminalState. The TerminalState version is thus deprecated.
  • Deprecating the python SimpleActionClient's get_terminal_state() and get_goal_state(). Replaced by get_state()
  • The done callback passed to Python's SimpleActionClient now takes the terminal state as one of the enumerated constants in actionlib_msgs/GoalStatus

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/common/common-0.5.0.tar.bz2

I am announcing the release of the robot_model.0.4.0. stack. Since the last release, we've worked hard to review the API and documentation of all packages in this stack. This resulted in a lot of extra documentation and tutorials, and some minor API changes in the kdl parser.

Changes

• API and Doc review: all packages in the robot_model stack have been through our API and Documentation review process.
  • Kdl parser
  • Deprecated xml_parser
  • Deprecated treeFromRobotModel method (replaced by treeFromUrdf). The deprecated functionality will be removed in the next release cycle.
  • URDF
  • Updated XML format documentation
  • New beginner tutorials to create and parse urdf files
  • Add command line tool to verify urdf file

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/robot_model/robot_model-0.4.0.tar.bz2

This release is mainly for final testing before the 0.9.0 release. We expect no significant changes between 0.3.0 and 0.9.0 other than removal of already deprecated APIs. A reminder: please switch from image_transport::ImagePublisher and image_transport::ImageSubscriber to image_transport::Publisher and image_transport::Subscriber.

Changes in this release are primarily of interest to image_transport plugin developers; see the full changelist.

A couple notes on compatibility with outside packages (trunk versions):

• compressed_image_transport has been updated for compatibility with post-0.1 image_common.
• image_view now allows you to specify a transport name on the command line. The default transport is "raw".

Changes

• image_transport:
  • Fixed bug in SimplePublisherPlugin making it unusable for non-trivial transports
  • Added internal subscription callback support to SimplePublisherPlugin
  • Parts of the documentation have been moved to the wiki

Download

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/image_common/image_common-0.3.0.tar.bz2

There are a number of changes. Most notably the usage of frame_id and parent_id, in Transform datatypes,have changed to child_frame_id and frame_id respectively to be consistent with all other data types.

There have been a few modifications to the bullet API. The goal is to converge onto bullet's API without patches. To get there please read about the patches applied.

Also, in geometry-0.2.0, the topic on which tf operates was changed from /tf_message to /tf. The library will continue listening on the old topic name for backwards compatibility.

Major Changes

• tf:
• Usage of tf::Stamped deprecated in favor of tf::StampedTransform
• parent_id -> frame_id
• frame_id -> child_frame_id
• transform_sender replaced by static_transform_publisher to allow backwards compatibility with this change

• bullet:

• Updated patches. Highlights below.
• Deprecated set/getEulerZYX methods
• Added get/setRPY methods
• cleaned up documentation
• various bug fixes

Minor Changes

• clean up of ~params
• removal of deprecated Node API usage
• tf_echo printouts cleaner
• tf_monitor is working and has better display

Downloads:

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/geometry/geometry-0.3.0.tar.bz2

The slam_gmapping and navigation stack releases have been updated as part of today's release of the perception-related stacks.

Download:

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/slam_gmapping/slam_gmapping-0.1.1.tar.bz2
• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/navigation/navigation-0.1.1.tar.bz2

Today we are releasing many of our perception-related libraries for ROS: image_common, image_pipeline, laser_pipeline, and opencv. All of these releases are 0.1 releases, which means that they are currently being user-tested for potential improvements.

• image_common provides lower-level image-related dependencies, including image_transport, which provides a plugin architecture for transporting raw and compressed image data.
• image_pipeline and laser_pipeline have very similar capabilities. laser_pipeline processes sensor data from laser range finders and can turn it into 3D point clouds. image_pipeline processes sensor data from mono and stereo cameras and can perform common image-processing tasks, like rectification and color processing. In the case of stereo, it can output 3D disparity images. These 3D representations can then be used in higher-level libraries.
• opencv is a ROS wrapper for the popular OpenCV computer vision toolkit. OpenCV is heavily used in higher-level libraries to perform many common perception-related tasks. The version we are using in ROS is a pre-release version of the upcoming OpenCV 2.0 release.

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/image_common/image_common-0.1.0.tar.bz2
• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/image_pipeline/image_pipeline-0.1.0.tar.bz2
• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/laser_pipeline/laser_pipeline-0.1.0.tar.bz2
• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/opencv/opencv-0.1.0.tar.bz2
  

Today we are releasing ROS Stacks representing many of the drivers we are supporting, as well as our common driver and diagnostics infrastructure. These drivers are being released with the 0.1 designation as we are currently performing user testing on them to make sure that they are easy-to-use and provide proper diagnostics information.

• diagnostics: diagnostics provides a common infrastructure for reporting, aggregating, and analyzing diagnostic information from hardware and other sources.
• driver_common: driver_common provides a common driver infrastructure that supports driver diagnostics and reconfiguration.
• imu_drivers: 3dmgx2 IMU driver (based on the driver in Player).
• joystick_drivers: joystick_drivers contains drivers for generic linux joysticks, the Playstation 3 SIXAXIS joystick and for 3Dconnection 3D input devices.
• laser_drivers: laser_drivers contains Hokuyo drivers (SCIP2.0-compliant, 04LX) as well as a ROS wrapper for sicktoolbox (SICK LIDAR devices).
• sound_drivers: driver for playing sounds over ROS Topics.

Download:

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/diagnostics/diagnostics-0.1.0.tar.bz2
• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/driver_common/driver_common-0.1.0.tar.bz2
• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/imu_drivers/imu_drivers-0.1.0.tar.bz2
• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/joystick_drivers/joystick_drivers-0.1.0.tar.bz2
• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/laser_drivers/laser_drivers-0.1.0.tar.bz2
• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/sound_drivers/sound_drivers-0.1.0.tar.bz2

As part of our release of common and geometry, common_msgs has been updated to 0.9.1. This update contains actionlib_msgs, which are part of the actionlib API in common.

Download:

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/commonmsgs/commonmsgs-0.9.1.tar.bz2

Today we are releasing our foundation ROS Stacks: Common and Geometry. We are also releasing initial versions of Navigation and Slam Gmapping, which are a critical pieces of functionality that have been heavily tested over the past year. Most recently, the Navigation Stack passed the Milestone 2 requirement of 26.2 miles of error-free indoor navigation. All of these stacks are being released with the 0.1 designation: we intend to have stable releases of each of these soon, but due to their central role in any robot software system, they are undergoing heavy user testing and their documentation is being improved.

We are also working on a new install system for ROS to handle automated installation of these stacks.

Summary of stacks:

• common: Common contains ROS Packages that have common use across a wide variety of functional areas, including C++ plugins, a robot action API, and wrappers for bfl, yaml-cpp and tinyxml.
• geometry: Geometry's most importantly provides the tf package, which defines how ROS nodes communicate about coordinate frames of the robot. Geometry also contains ROS wrappers for KDL, Eigen, and Bullet.
• slam_gmapping: slam_gmapping contains the gmapping package, which is a ROS wrapper around GMapping from the OpenSLAM project. Gmapping enables you to use laser range data to construct maps.
• navigation: The Navigation Stack provides autonomous navigation capabilities to differential drive and holonomic wheeled robots. It has been heavily tested on the PR2 robot within an indoor office environment.

As you can see from the descriptions above, these stacks incorporate code from many other open source projects, including Orocos, Eigen, Bullet, OpenSLAM, Poco, yaml-cpp, Player, and tinyxml. We are grateful to these projects for providing useful libraries to build upon.

Downloads:

• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/common/common-0.1.0.tar.bz2
• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/geometry/geometry-0.1.0.tar.bz2
• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/navigation/navigation-0.1.0.tar.bz2
• http://www.ros.org/download/stacks/slam_gmapping/slam_gmapping-0.1.0.tar.bz2

ROS 0.7.2 has been released (SVN tag)! This is a patch release that fixes various issues in preparation for our upcoming ROS Stack releases. We have also been focusing on improving error messages and performance based on ongoing user testing. The detailed change list is below.

-- Your friendly neighborhood ROS team

roscpp

• Fixed subscription callbacks to not starve other callbacks in a certain case.
• Doxygen fixes for deprecated functions that were not pointing at the correct new locations.
• Fixed `_param:=value` on anonymous nodes when `__name:=` was specified
• Fixed race condition that would cause a "call to empty boost::function" exception

rospy

• fixed bug with Time objects jumping to zero with simulated time on publish in certain cases
• bug fix to numpy_msg
• suppress error message stack trace for common case of connection refused

rosbagmigration

• Fixed bug where checkbag incorrectly reports that a bag is up to date if it has moved without md5sum changing
• Fixed bug where messages including messages from other packages where not populating migration rules fully
• Stop displaying redundantly auto-generated rules boundary conditions where multiple scenarios lead to the same parallel generation
• Programmatic use of checkbag/fixbag within a single script now cache initial load of message migrator. This gives huge savings when checking/fixing large numbers bags in batch, such as during testing.
• Added "fixbag_batch.py" script which operates on multiple bags more easily and efficiently

rosrecord/roslib

• fixed major issues with generate_dynamic and Header messages
• better error message in generate_dynamic
• better cleanup of dynamically generated .py / .pyc files in roslib
• Fixed manifest for rosrecord so external users can use librosrecorder now that it's been broken out from just a header.

roslib: fixed cache use of ROS_PACKAGE_PATH when it is not set
rostopic: bug fix to bw command and better error reporting
roswtf: numerous updates, including better offline behavior, and fix to duplicate node rule
topic_tools: export MuxSelect header
rosmsg: bug fix to indentation of constants with rosmsg show
roslaunch-deps: better handling of bad xml
rostest: suppress output from master during tests
rxtools/rxconsole:

• Fixed assertion on page up/arrow up when the number of messages in the list control is 0
• Fixed high CPU utilization when no new messages have arrived

rosdep: festival, libusb (r5530)
rosstack: bug fixes so that it works again, and handles unversioned stack dependencies. uses ROS_ROOT and ROS_PACKAGE_PATH if ROS_STACK_PATH is not defined. Expose librosstack via package manifest and moving rosstack.h into the package include directory

ROS 0.7.1 has been released! This is a patch release, with the bulk of changes addressing regressions that occurred with the 0.7.0 update. If you have experienced issues with rosrecord, roslaunch, or rxplot, you may wish to install this update.

Fixes:

• roslaunch: fix to printerrlog issue in __init__.py
• rosdep: mplement a one-step 'install' argument
• rosrecord:
  • fix in time scaling related to playback of multiple bags.
  • fix in rpath being cleared on install to $ROS_ROOT/bin
  • fixed bug over-aggressively resizing a message buffer
• rostopic: better error message if topic type is invalid and minor fixes
• rxplot:
  • added missing time import
  • fix bad wxwidgets swig wrapper import
  • bug fixes to errors when invalid topic name or spec are given
• rosbuild:
  • fix to dependency management for auto-generated source files
  • very probable fix for the delete-a-file problem
• rospy: ignore spurious exception caused in receive_loop during interpreter shutdown
• rosemacs: minor updates due to rostopic changes
• rosdep: pygame, python-clearsilver, debian updates, qt3, log4cxx (OS X)
• rosconfig: fix bug that was raising an exception in all non-svk installs

ROS 0.7 has been released. The 0.7.x series introduces many new features and bug fixes. The two biggest changes are "Publisher latching" as well as the deprecation of the old roscpp "Node" API.

Publisher latching: Publisher latching lets you automatically send the last message published to new subscribers. This has many uses cases. For example, instead of writing a map Service, you could have a map Topic. A Topic is preferable as you can then record the map data using rosrecord. Another use for publisher latching is to reduce the publication rate for data that is slowly changing, as you can now more easily ensure that new subscribers will receive the latest data automatically. Previously this was possible using subscriber callbacks, but this streamlines implementations. By default, rostopic pub now latches, so you can use it to quickly 'latch' a value into the ROS Computation Graph.

Node API deprecated: roscpp's Node API is now deprecated in favor of the NodeHandle API. Some of the NodeHandle methods have been deprecated as well. Please update your code as the Node API will be removed in future releases. Please see the notes below for specific details on NodeHandle methods that have been deprecated.

For a more detailed list of changes, please see the changelist.

To download this release, please visit the download page.

We've also put together a new tutorial to introduce the ROS concepts and associated command-line tools. This is still a work-in-progress, but feel free to check it out.

ROS 0.6.1 has been released. This is a minor bug-fix update. Updating is not essential unless you've encountered the problems mentioned below.

Fixes:

• rosrecord: fix_md5sums.py executable permission was not set. If you need to use fix_md5sums.py script and you do not want to download the 0.6.1 release, you can simply set the executable bit manually by running:
  chmod +x `rospack find rosrecord`/scripts/fix_md5sums.py
• roscpp:
  • gcc 4.4 support
  • Added operator= overload on NodeHandle
  • Bug fix for serializing array of times
• roslisp
  • Bug fix for dealing with lookup-hostname-ip-address
  • Bug fix for fixed-size arrays

ROS 0.6.0 has been released! Our big goals for this release were to make bag files more robust, add in UDP transport for C++ users and prepare for our upcoming releases of stacks (e.g. navigation). With previous releases, bag files would become unreadable if the messages they were recorded from were changed. The new bag file format enables bag files to always be read and comes with tools for migrating them in the event of changes. As a result of these updates, all of your existing bag files will need to be updated. There are more instructions on our more detailed change list.

Related to our bag file changes, we've also changed our md5sum calculation for message versions to make it easier to move, rename, and add comments to messages. You can now perform these changes without altering the md5sum.

We've added in UDP as an experimental transport to our C++ library. This UDP transport is currently point-to-point and targeted at low-latency applications for ROS, such as teleoperation.

Another major update is the introduction of the searchParam API to the Parameter Server. In the past, it was difficult to push node down into child namespaces and still have them share common parameters. For example, you may wish to set a parameter like the robot description in a parent namespace and have all children easily read from it. The searchParam API solves this problem by allowing you to search for a parameter in parent namespaces, returning the parameter key that is closest to your node's namespace.

There are many other updates in this release, so please consult the detailed list of changes. You can also consult our roadmap to get a preview of the remaining features we are planning for ROS as we move towards a 1.0 release.

ROS 0.5.3 has been released, which is a minor update to our ROS 0.5 release. Most of the changes in this release address installation and build compatibility issues. We are in the process of transitioning our build and installation process to better support a broader range of Linux platforms as well as provide for more automated installation. Release notes are below.

Change List

• rosbuild: small fixes to support CMake 2.4.6
• roslaunch: add dependency on rosout
• rospy: bug fix to private command-line parameters
• rosdep: updated dependency database with Debian package names
• rosconfig: beginnings of a fully-automated installation method

ROS 0.5.1 has been released, which is a minor update to our ROS 0.5 release. This release includes enhancements to roscpp, such as timer callbacks, that build upon the recently releaased Node Handle API. There have also been changes to roslaunch that group together log files from the same launch as well as changes to rospy to prepare for upcoming changes to "bag" files. Release notes are below, or you can view the full list of changes.

Change List

• roslaunch: changed location of log files so that logs from the same launch are collected together in the same directory. This makes it easier to find results of a run and prevents log filename recycling.
• roscpp
  • Timer callbacks allow you to receive a callback at a specified rate. See the "timers" tutorial in the roscpp_tutorials package.
  • Transport hints let you specify TCP_NODELAY per subscription.
  • All nodes now advertise "~get_loggers" and "~set_logger_level" services, which can be called through the rosservice tool.
  • Publish calls should no longer take a large amount of time (spikes up to 100ms were seen).
  • Subscriptions created through the NodeHandle API can no longer block the ROS thread. Queue size should now behave properly.
  • Added Publisher::getNumSubscribers() call
• rospy
  • refactored much of the genmsg_py code to add dynamic message generators, fix handling of uint8[] types, fix handling of string constants, and add more tests.
  • bug fix to rospy.myargv() handling

  • get_time/get_rostime now throw an exception if init_node has not been called

• rxtools: New rxloggerlevel tool which lets you change the logger levels of roscpp nodes while they are running
• rostopic: rostopic hz now prints "no new messages" if no new messages have been received since last print
• rosmsg: rosmsg show now properly includes constants
• rospack
  • profile output marks directories that contain no manifest
  • recover from bad cache location of a package
• rosbuild: recover from bad cache location of rospack
• rosrecord: rosplay now complains clearly and exits if asked to play a non-existent .bag file

Time to celebrate! ROS 0.5 is here! You can download it from ros.sourceforge.net.

We've been working furiously on ROS to incorporate new features and APIs to make ROS easier to use and more robust. The biggest change is the introduction of the roscpp "Node Handle" API, which is based on months of feedback from the ROS community and our own internal testing. There's also a new, experimental roswtf tool, which we hope to evolve into a powerful system-wide diagnosis tool. To find out more about this release, please read the list of changes.

This release also marks the start of our 'stack' releases. In the coming weeks, look for our first release of ROS Stacks, which are collections of ROS packages that are now mature enough for release to a wider audience. One of the first stacks that we will release will be the Navigation stack, which was heavily tested and refined during Milestone 1.

ROS 0.4 ("Mango Tango") has been released at SourceForge. ROS is the "Robot Operating System" that is the basis of our PR2 robot software development. If you're new to ROS, you can head over to the ROS wiki, where you'll find an overview, installation instructions, tutorials, and more.

Our first milestone was a major test of the robustness of ROS, requiring multiple days of continued operation of a 2D navigation stack with many software components interacting across multiple computers. We now feel that ROS is ready for an official release to the wider robotics community. Although this is an 0.4 release, we are committed to a stable API as we march towards a 1.0 release. For you early adopters that have been using ROS via Subversion, we appreciate your patience through the changes we have been making these past several weeks and hope that you will find this release a stable platform on which to continue developing.

This is the first of many releases of ROS in the coming months. In addition to future updates, we will be working on releasing parts of our Personal Robots software stack. We hope that you will find these drivers and algorithms useful in building robotics applications and accelerating research. Please feel free to give us feedback on this release on our ros-users mailing list or by filing feature requests (or bugs) in our ticket system.

ROS grew out of work at Stanford University, and contains contributions from community members around the world. It is released under a BSD license, making it available for both commercial and non-commercial use.