December 2013 Archives

This ROS Spotlight introduces a brand new, advanced platform for roboticists.

The REEM-C robot from PAL Robotics is a fully ROS-based biped with outstanding autonomy. This guy can walk around for up to 3 hours and has an idle time of 6 hours. REEM-C is equipped with laser sensors in the feet so that the navigation system has up-close input.

REEM-C is human-sized: it is 1.65 meters tall and weighs 80 kgs. It integrates all computation on board with two i7 computers. After spending long hours in the gym, this robot is able to lift and carry up to 10 kilos, which makes it among the strongest robots in its class.

With this robot, researchers have an out-of-the box solution for walking, navigation, manipulation, vision and speech recognition, all implemented using ROS. The hood is open and the system is ready to be modified to fit your project requirements.

The simulation model of the robot is publicly available with basic controllers already set up. Find more information about REEM-C on its ROS wiki page!

PAL Robotics first established itself by developing REEM-A, a biped robot able to play chess with a human. PAL continued with REEM-B, which was engineered to do general manipulation and walking, and the REEM series, which is a robot designed to interact with people in public, dynamic environments.

To learn more about REEM-C, their latest biped robot for research, check out thePAL Robotics website!

From Berend Kupers, Alten Mechatronics cross-posted on ROS-Industrial blog

Alten Mechatronics, in collaboration with CSi Palletising systems, developed a demonstrator using an ABB IRB6640 robot to show that a system based on ROS-Industrial can easily cope with unknown products and uncertainties in the environment. Very little setup time was required for the actual hardware.

Two pallets were placed in the workspace of the robot. On one of these pallets three boxes of unknown size were randomly placed. The size, position and orientation of the boxes were determined using a Kinect, the Openni package and the PCL library. Based on this information, a path was calculated by MoveIt! and was then sent to the robot controller using the ABB ROS-Industrial package.

To make offline testing of the connection between the ROS-pc and the ABB motion controller possible, Alten Mechatronics developed a setup in which a ROS-pc was connected to a pc running the official ABB ABB RobotStudio software. This reduced the hardware set up time to less than one day. The current implementation reached a grasping accuracy of approximately 1cm, which indicates the accuracy of the vision system can be improved. This can be done by using more accurate sensors (e.g., laser triangulation, Time of Flight cameras) and more advanced filtering algorithms. For this demonstrator, the existing ABB drivers had to be adapted to allow controlling the gripper using the I/O interface of the IRC5 controller, which indicates a the need for a standardized Robot I/O interface in ROS-Industrial, to make implementation even easier.

Our first ROS Spotlight showcases the most recently-published book about ROS, "Learning ROS for Robotics Programming", by Aaron Martinez and Enrique Fernández. This book is available online via Packt Publishing, a company that focuses on open source software and pays royalties to open source projects.

"Learning ROS for Robotics Programming" provides practical examples to help readers understand the ROS framework. To begin, it presents basic ROS concepts to help new users get started. The authors continue by introducing various compelling topics such as modeling, sensor integration, computer vision, and navigation algorithms.

With your new understanding of ROS, you'll be able to build your own robot applications in simulation, allow your robot to see with its sensors, and make your robot navigate autonomously.

Pick up a copy of "Learning ROS for Robotics Programming" and dive into the exciting world of ROS and robotics!

Buy this book

For more on ROS, you can also check out "ROS by Example".

When we started work on ROS, like most young open source projects, our greatest need was to recruit early adopters and fellow developers. So we targeted that audience: we built a wiki, filled it with documentation, tutorials, and code examples, and made the wiki the landing page at www.ros.org.

Well, times have changed. Now, six years into the project, we have a broader audience to consider. We want to reach teachers who are considering using ROS in their classrooms, managers who want to use ROS in a new product, journalists who are writing stories about ROS, and many, many others.

So, in celebration (just a bit late) of ROS's sixth birthday, we're pleased to present a new www.ros.org.

After all, a grown-up ROS deserves a grown-up website. Don't worry: the wiki is still there, as are all the other ROS sites on which we depend.

Btw, like most things we do, the website itself is at GitHub. If you run into a problem or have an idea for improving the site, open an issue and we'll have a look.