March 2014 Archives

We're pleased to announce that registration is now open for ROS Kong 2014, an international ROS users group meeting, to be held on June 6th at Hong Kong University, immediately following ICRA:

https://events.osrfoundation.org/ros-kong-2014/

This one-day event, our first official ROS meeting in Asia, will complement ROSCon 2014, which will happen later this year (stay tuned for updates on that event).

Register for ROS Kong 2014 today: https://events.osrfoundation.org/ros-kong-2014/#registration Early registration ends April 30, 2014.

ROS Kong 2014 will feature: * Invited speakers: Learn about the latest improvements to and applications of ROS software from some of the luminaries in our community. * Lightning talks: One of our most popular events, lightning talks are back-to-back 3-minute presentations that are scheduled on-site. Bring your project pitch and share it with the world! * Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) meetings: Get together with folks who share your specific interest, whether it's ROS in embedded systems, ROS in space, ROS for products, or anything else that will draw a crowd.

To keep us all together, coffee breaks and lunch will be catered on-site. There will also be a hosted reception (with food and drink) at a classic Hong Kong venue at the end of the day. Throughout the day, there will be lots of time to meet other ROS users both from Asia and around the world.

If you have any questions or are interested in sponsoring the event please contact us at roskong-2014-oc@osrfoundation.org.

Sincerely, Your ROS Kong 2014 Organizing Committee Tully Foote, Brian Gerkey, Wyatt Newman, Daniel Stonier

From Bert Willaert of Intermodalics.

Intermodalics is currently developing a depalletizing application for a client. The goal is to move an average of 2,000 crates per hour from standard pallets to a conveyor belt. Additional challenges include: more than 10 different crate types can occur in varying colors, the crates are not necessarily empty and they are randomly stacked.

The application consists of a UR10 robot from Universal Robots, a 3D camera, an Intermodalics Intelligent Controller (IIC) and an active pallet lift. The software for the application running on the IIC extensively uses ROS and the OROCOS toolchain. OROCOS is a software framework for realtime, distributed robot and machine control which is seamlessly integrated with ROS and has both Industrial and Academic users worldwide.

For finding the crates' position and orientation, Intermodalics developed a crate localizer that builds upon the PCL library as well as on a set of in-house developed point-cloud processing algorithms. The ROS visualization tool RViz proved absolutely invaluable during the realization of this product locator.

The use of the ROS-Industrial package for the UR robot allows both the motions and the application state machine to be simulated. This significantly facilitates the implementation of the whole application.

The integration of the UR controller and the IIC does not affect the inherent safety feature of the UR robot which makes the robot stop if it encounters excessive forces. If such a stop occurs, the application can be easily restarted by a simple human operator intervention.

From Ryan Thompson via ros-users@

Quanergy is a Silicon-Valley-based startup developing smart sensing solutions for real-time 3D mapping and object detection, tracking, and classification. We're a small company run by engineers, dedicated to building next-generation LiDAR technology for autonomous vehicles and advanced driver assistance systems. By joining our team at this point, you'll play a key role in the development of our company, not just our software. We're looking for someone extremely bright, driven, a great communicator and explainer, and just as passionate about the future of transportation and perception as we are!

Job Description:

The Software Engineer at Quanergy will be responsible for designing, developing, and maintaining our map data structure and access system and parallelizing localization with a GPU, all based on point cloud data generated by our next-generation LiDAR sensors. She will work closely with co-workers to test and optimize code for real-time application on the embedded CPU and GPU. He will keep current with the latest research and advances in the field, help shape the direction of software side of the company, and contribute to the sensor integration, mapping, and perception efforts of the software team.

Requirements:

• B.S., M.S., or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or a related field

• Fluency in C++ and Linux

• CUDA (or OpenGL) expertise

• Strong mathematical foundation

• Willingness and ability to tackle problems outside his/her areas of expertise

• Academic or professional experience in at least one of: Robotics, Parallel Programming, Real-Time Embedded Systems, Game Development

Desired:

• ROS and/or PCL familiarity

• Experience with optimization for real-time computing

• Able to start immediately

Compensation:

Quanergy offers very competitive Silicon Valley salaries and equity.

Contact:

Email ryan.thompson@quanergy.com for more information. To apply, email with a resumé and cover letter, or apply on Stack Overflow: http://careers.stackoverflow.com/jobs/51242/software-engineer-at-exciting-3d-mapping-startup-quanergy-systems-inc

As reported at HERE Three Sixty, their global fleet of hundreds of mapping cars is running ROS!

They carry laser range-finders, cameras, and GPS that are used to estimate the vehicle's posisiton and gather 3-D pictures of the surrounding environment. That data gets shipped back to their headquarters for processing.

As HERE's Michael Prados put it, "The system of sensors and computers means the software that's needed is very like that which is used to create robots." So they decided to build their cars' software on ROS. The software runs on a headless server in the car's interior, with the driver interacting via a mobile application on a tablet that he or she can operate easily from the seat.

"We chose the open source ROS because it was the best solution, hands-down," Michael concludes. "And now we're looking into the ways that we might give back to OSRF, and help its future success."

Read the whole story at HERE Three Sixty.

From Kel Guerin at Johns Hopkins University

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At the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics at Johns Hopkins University, we have utilized the extensive visualization tools available in ROS to create an immersive virtual reality environment for interacting with robots. The versatile plug-in system for the RVIZ visualization package has allowed us to create virtual user interfaces, information displays, and interactive objects that co-exist with other resources in the RVIZ environment. Additionally, the excellent Oculus Rift RVIZ plugin gave us the perfect starting point for using RVIZ as a VR environment. This provides us an excellent test-bed for virtually teleoperating an teleprogramming our robots. Finally, the flexibility of ROS lets us deploy IVRE on several robots in our lab, including industrial systems and surgical robots. For more information on the tools we used, checkout the oculus rviz plugin and the RVIZ plugin API.