May 2014 Archives

The VLAB will be hosting a robotics event this Thursday featuring several ROS using companies. Details below: 

VLAB MAY 29^th:  ROBOTS LIVING AMONGST US

A new generation of innovative robotic platforms is emerging with human cadenceand more adaptable automation solutionsRobots are learning to perform complex tasks and to interact with humans in boundless environments. 

Will these robots facilitate the predicted re-shoring or renaissance in US manufacturing? And what will be the economic consequences of this new co-habitation?  Join us on Thursday, May 29th, 2014 to find out!

Moderator:
Andra Keay, Managing Director, Silicon Valley Robotics 

Panelists:
Melonee Wise, CEO & Founder, Unbounded Robotics
Milan Shah, VP of Software Engineering,Rethink Robotics 
John Dulchinos, Vice President of Automation, Jabil Circuits 
Peter Hebert, Co-Founder, Lux Capital

Demos:
Aldebaran | Dash Robotics | OSRF (Open Source Robotics Foundation) | Otherlab | Precise Automation | Revolve Robotics | Tempo Automation

We're looking forward to ROS Kong in two weeks. In preparation for the event we're happy to publish the abstracts of the presentations.

Open Source Robotics at JSK/Tokyo

Kei Okada

Robotics, specially Humanoids research requires long-term vision and efforts due to it's complexity and synthesis. This talk will show research history on humanoid robots last 20 years at JSK/U-Tokyo and discuss how we have been integrating and maintaining integrated humanoid software over different generation of both students and robots. Rapid-prototyping and contentious-development is the key of these environment and how these features are utilized in national/international projects and challenges. From this perspective, emergence of opensource robotics had great impact since we already had great deal of in-house software resources and had to cope with how to fuse and connect existing internal software and external open software. I'll not only explain strategy to this integration but also show our automatic translation system of different software component. Lastly, I'll explain our effort on commercializing our software in Tokyo to expand open robotics software not only academia but also robotic industries.

Robot Middleware Standard: RT-Middleware: Its architecture, implementation and standardization

Noriaki Ando

RT-Middleware (RTM) is an OMG standard specification of a component model and its implementations for robotic systems. We already have a dozen of implementations, and interoperability among implementations are guaranteed by the standard specification. Moreover its ports mechanism enables interoperability to other middlewares such as ROS DDS and so on, and the execution context feature of RTM realizes real-time capabilities, which is utilized in HRP, Hiro/Nextage and SHAFT's humanoid and so on. In this talk, the concept of RT-Middleware, architecture and implementations will be introduced. New standardization activity in OMG to define unified software component model will also be presented. As other topic, our collaboration with US DoD in DARPA DRC and new projects will be mentioned.

ROS at CSIRO

Paulo Borges

In this talk we will discuss how our team at CSIRO is using ROS in our robotic platforms, including internal projects and development processes.

CSIRO is Australia's national research agency and our lab, the Autonomous Systems Laboratory, has a very strong focus on field robots, carrying out research on ground, air, and underwater vehicles.

The ROS-based platforms we will present include autonomous industrial ground vehicles, air vehicles, thermal-camera based 3D mapping and the Zebedee 3D laser-scanner.

I will show how the platforms combine out-of-the-box ROS packages with in-house developed packages, indicating where ROS works perfectly as well as some of the issues we face.

Finally, we will also contrast ROS with DDX (Dynamic Data Exchange), which was our successful alternative before ROS was made available.

ROS, Atlas and the DARPA Robotics Challenge

Wyatt Newman and Chris Swetenham

This presentation will review use of ROS in controlling a Boston Dynamics "Atlas" humanoid robot competing in the DARPA Robotics Challenge as "Team HKU" (Hong Kong University). Atlas robots were delivered in August, and the DRC "trials" were held in December, allowing very little time for interfacing to and programming of this new robot. Additionally, a challenging constraint of the DRC is limited communications between the robot in the field and a remote operator. A specific ROS challenge was the need to run local and remote ROS cores to limit communications via a "net tunnel." Use of ROS will also be described in the contexts of locomotion planning, manipulation planning, vision-guided manipulation, balancing and force control. Live Atlas demonstrations will be performed.

Getting Into ROS: What's available and how to use it easily

Daniel Stonier

In this presentation I will discuss various approaches and technologies that are at your disposal when wishing to connect to a ROS robot. ROS has a large and sometimes bewildering variety of solutions in its arsenal - ssh tunnels, remotely networked ROS pc's, rqt plugins, robot web tools, java-android apps, pairing with application managers and also some more esoteric multimastering techniques. However, what is right for your team and your user's needs? This can be a complex question and a lack of documentation or knowledge about the technologies and languages they use often makes the answer non-trivial.

Here I will introduce each method with some tips and a list of pros and cons. Finally I will conclude with an overview and a few directional pointers so that you can get your own connectivity needs kickstarted without undue time consuming experimentation.

If you haven't already, there's still space to register.

From Sebastian Rockel

I'd just like to announce a related ICRA talk on Wednesday (15:40-16:00, Session WeC07.6, Room S225) held by myself.

Its about simulation-based prediction of action results in a plan-based robotic system. The system is heavily using ROS and Gazebo.

So if someone is interested I would be looking forward to see you then.

Abstract: In this work we ask whether an integrated system based on the concept of human imagination and realized as a hyperreal setup can improve system robustness and autonomy. In particular we focus on how non-nominal failures in a planning-based system can be detected before actual failure. To investigate, we integrated a system combining an accurate physics-based simulation, robust object recognition and a sym- bolic planner to achieve realistic prediction of robot actions. A Gazebo simulation was used to reason about and evaluate situations before and during plan execution. The simulation enabled re-planning to take place in advance of actual plan failure. We present a restaurant scenario in which our system prevents plan failure and successfully lets the robot serve a drink on a table cluttered with objects. The results give us confidence in our approach to improving situations where unavoidable abstractions of robot action planning meet the real world.

Kind regards,

Sebastian

From Andreas ten Pas via ros-users@

Hi all,

although it has been available in the packages for quite a while, I wanted to officially announce our ROS Hydro package for localizing handles in 3D point clouds: http://wiki.ros.org/handle_detector

You can see a demonstration of the localization on Rethink Robotics' Baxter robot that is clearing several objects from a table in this video:

A tutorial for using our software is available at the ROS wiki page given above.

If you find any problems, feel free to report them at: https://github.com/atenpas/handle_detector/issues

All the best,

Andreas

From Jesse Scholtes, Eindhoven, the Netherlands

In December 2013, TMC and YASKAWA Benelux set out to make a technology demonstrator.

YASKAWA sees a shift in robotics, from welding, handling, painting to new application areas. Some recent developments of YASKAWA are 'milking-robots' and 'slaughter-robots'. And as we are aware of, Universities and research institutions are working hard on the introduction of robots in (health) care or other areas where human interaction is present and essential.

A new era of smart robotics is becoming a reality. The development of these new robots pose new technological problems and need different solutions. It raises questions about how a robot can be programmed to deal with changing environments? How an intuitive and user-friendly interface can be created? Or how flexible mechanics can be be designed to handle different object just like humans do. And more and foremost how to create smarter safety systems such that robots can safely operate among people.

The demonstrator sets out to do accomplish a number of things:

• Use a 'higher' software environment like ROS
• Integration of vision to make the robot aware of its surroundings;
• Implementation of a flexible gripper to make it possible to perform different tasks;
• Use a modern user interface like a tablet or smartphone to control the robot;
• Make the robot perform some tasks that are expected from service robotics.

After a brainstorm we came up with the idea that the robot should pick, slice and squeeze an orange to make fresh orange juice, next to that it should also serve this glass to someone in the audience.

For 3½ months and with a team of 12 people we shared our Monday evenings and a lot of enthusiasm to build this orange crusher or as we call her nowadays: (Juicy) Lucy. The team consisted of people with different backgrounds: mechatronics, robotics, embedded software, mechanical design and electronics. Our deadline was the High Tech Systems Fair the 7th or 8th of May.

ROS enabled us to quickly prototype and realize our demonstrator. Using ROS we combined several piece of hardware:

• An Android tablet where we designed two different apps. A user app to choose the amount of orange juice. And an engineering app that allowed us to control the robot gripper, provided ROS INFO messages plus control over the state machine.

• A laptop and a mini pc; where the mini pc was used to perform the image processing.

• A webcam, where its images were used to dynamically extract the X, Y coordinates of the oranges.

• An Arduino board. Here, the Arduino board was used to control the gripper which was equipped with 4 x stepper motors, 4 end switches and a sonar sensor (the sonar was used to measure the height of the orange).

An example of the system overview can be seen here.

In the end we managed to deliver the first version of our demonstrator that serves as a platform for future enhancements and add more complexity. The fruits of our labor can be viewed in the following video.

Making Juice at the High Tech Systems Fair 2014 from YASK_dem on Vimeo.

At this point the HTS fair is the only fair were we presented our demonstrator. At the moment we are brainstorming on a follow up for the project.

From Pablo Gil

ROS-RM. Workshop on "ROS and his applications for Robotic Manipulation"

• Alicante, Spain, 23 July 2014
• Web: www.aurova.ua.es/rosrm2014
• Email: rosrm@dfists.ua.es

REGISTRATION

The fee for the ROS-RM 2014 Workshop is 100 Euros. Registration covers attendance to all lectures, handling material, two coffee breaks and one lunch from the University to Alicante city. Payment should be done by bank transfer (more information at the web site).

APPLICATION DEADLINE: 20 June 2014 (NO extensions will be given)

http://www.aurova.ua.es/index.php/es/rosrmapp

VENUE

ROS-RM Workshop 2014 will be held at the Polythecnic College of the University of Alicante, in San Vicente del Raspeig (Alicante), Spain. Alicante is located on south east at the Mediterranean coast. The University is 15 minutes from the center city of Alicante by tram, while the Alicante airport is 20 minutes by car.

SPEAKERS AND PROGRAMME

• Juan Antonio Corrales, Marie Curie University, Paris-France
• Sachin Chitta, SRI, USA.
• Guillaume Walck, University of Bielefeld, Germany
• Federico Tombari, University of Bologna, Italy

• Toni Oliver, Shadow Robot Company, UK

• Session 1: ROS Architecture. Introduction and basic concepts

• Session 2: MoveIt! A Tool for Manipulation
• Session 3: Manipulation with a Dexterous Hand
• Session 4: 3D Object recognition with the PCL
• Session 5: Shadow-hand with ROS

MOTIVATION AND DESCRIPTION

The hands-on will be delivered by world renowned experts in the field, from both academia and industry, and will cover both theoretical and practical aspects of different tools integrated in ROS.

The workshop aims to provide a stimulating opportunity for young researchers and Ph.D. students. The participants will benefit from direct interaction and discussions with world leaders in ROS framework.

ORGANIZERS

• Automation, Robotic and Artificial Vision (http://www.aurova.ua.es)
• University of Alicante (http://www.ua.es/)

ROS-RM SPONSORS

• Valencia Regional Government (PROMETEO 2013/085).

ENDORSED BY:

• Automation, Robotic and Artificial Vision http://www.aurova.ua.es
• University of Alicante http://www.ua.es/
• University Institute for Computing Research http://www.iuii.ua.es

MORE INFORMATION

• www.aurova.ua.es/rosrm2014
• rosrm@dfists.ua.es

From ROS-Industrial

lease find the program and agenda for the ROS-Industrial Basic Developers' Training Class May 19-20, 2014. This class, similar to the one held in June 2013, is geared toward individuals with a programming background who seek to learn to compose their own ROS nodes (now in ROS Hydro). The first day will be in the classroom focused on background ROS/ROS-I skills, and the second day will be devoted to a lab programming exercise: a collision-free pick-and-place application (video below) with real industrial robot hardware. Bring a laptop to the class with the training exercise Virtual Machine pre-installed.

Register here: http://rosindustrial.org/training-registration.