March 2016 Archives

From OSRF

The first step in doing something new, useful, and exciting with ROS is -- without exception -- learning how to use ROS. Ralph Seulin is part of CNRS in France, which, along with universities in Spain and Scotland, collaboratively offer a masters course in robotics and computer vision that includes a focus on ROS. Over four semesters, between 30 and 40 students go through the program. In this talk, Seulin discusses how ROS is taught to these students, as well as what kinds of research they leverage that knowledge into.

Before Seulin's group could effectively teach ROS to students, they had to learn ROS for themselves. This was a little bit more difficult way back in 2013 than it is now, but they took advantage of the ROS Wiki , read all the books on ROS they could get ahold of, and of course made sure to attend ROSCon. From there, Seulin developed a series of tutorials for his students, starting with simulations and ending up with practical programming in ROS on the TurtleBot 2. Ultimately, students spend 250 hours on a custom robotics project that integrates motion control, navigation and localization, and computer vision tasks.

Seulin also makes use of ROS in application development. One of those applications is in precision vineyard agriculture because, as Seulin explains, "we come from Burgundy." Using lasers mounted on a tractor to collect and classify 3D data, a prototype robot tractor can be used to analyze vineyard canopies and estimate leaf density. With this information, vineyards can dynamically adjust the application of agricultural chemicals, using just the right amount and only where necessary. Better for plants, better for humans, thanks to ROS.

ROSCon 2015 Hamburg: Day 1 - Ralph Seulin: ROS for education and applied research: practical experiences from OSRF on Vimeo.

From Christina Gomez

Southwest Research Institute is hosting a ROS-Industrial Training Class April 6 - 8, 2016 in San Antonio Texas. Wednesday at 8 am, we begin with a functional check of the VM's, and end with a dinner in downtown San Antonio. A more detailed agenda can be found at the ROS-I website.

The classroom portion is similar to the training held last year with the same curriculum and lab option for Descartes. Please bring a laptop to the class with the ROS-I training Virtual Machine pre-installed. This class is geared toward individuals with a programming background who seek to learn to compose their own ROS nodes. Day 1 will focus on basic/introductory ROS concepts. Day 2 will examine motion planning using MoveIt! as well as the Descartes planner and Perception concepts. Day 3 offers a lab programming exercise (with a choice of): 

• Simple Perception Lab
• Simple MoveIt! Application
• Simple Descartes Application.
• Pick and Place Application

Registration is now open: http://rosindustrial.org/training-registration

Book your hotel by March 22 to receive the discounted room rate! Details can be found at the ROS-I website.

Thank you for your interest in ROS-Industrial.

From OSRF

Daniel Di Marco is part of Deepfield Robotics, a 20 person agricultural robotics startup within Bosch. Deepfield makes robots that can, among other things, visually locate and then brutally destroy weeds by pounding them into the dirt. In order to deliver software to their customers, Deepfield decided to create its own build farm, and Di Marco's ROSCon presentation explains why managing a build farm internally is a good idea for a startup.

A build farm is a system that can automatically create Debian packages for you, while running integrated unit tests and generating documentation. OSRF already supports all of ROS with its own build farm, so why would anyone want to set up a build farm for themselves instead? Simple, says Di Marco: it's something you should do if you actually want to make money with your robots.

If ROS is a part of your thriving robotics business, running a build farm allows you to do several important things. First, since you're hosting your code on your own servers, you can maintain control over it, protecting your intellectual property and any proprietary components that you may be using. Second, you can use your build farm to distribute your packages directly to your customers, who are (presumably) paying you, and not to just anybody who swings by and wants to snag them. And lastly, you can decide what versions of different packages you want to keep using, rather than being subjected to upgrades that may not work as well.

Di Marco concludes by discussing why Docker is an easy and reliable foundation for a build farm, and how to get it set up. Most of the process has been scripted, thanks to some hard work at OSRF, and Di Marco walks us through an initial deployment to help you get your own build farm up and running.

ROSCon 2015 Hamburg: Day 1 - Daniel Di Marco: Docker-based ROS Build Farm from OSRF on Vimeo.

Originally posted on www.osrfoundation.org

Morgan Quigley is first author of the authoritative 2009 workshop paper on the Robot Operating System. He's been Chief Architect at OSRF since 2012, and in 2013, MIT Tech Review awarded Quigley a prestigious TR35 award. In addition to software development, Quigley knows a thing or two about hardware: he helped Sandia National Labs design high-efficiency bipeds for DARPA, and he also gave Sandia a hand with the development of their sensor-rich, high-DOF robotic hand.

Quigley's ROSCon talk is focused on small (but not tiny) microcontrollers: 32-bit MCUs running at a few hundred megahertz or so, with USB and Ethernet connections. While these types of processors can't power smartphones or run Linux, they are found in many popular embedded systems, such as the Pixhawk PX4 autopilot. Microcontrollers like these would be much easier to integrate if they all operated under a standardized communication protocol, but there are enough inconvenient hoops that have to be jumped through to run ROS on them that it's usually not worth the hassle.

ROS 2, which doesn't rely on a master node and has native UDP message passing, promises to work much better than ROS on distributed embedded systems. To make ROS 2 fit on a small microcontroller, Quigley demonstrates a few applications of FreeRTPS, a portable, embedded-friendly implementation of the network protocol underlying ROS 2.

After showing the impressive results of some torture tests on a Discovery board, Quigley talks about what's coming next, including a focus on even smaller microcontrollers (like Arduino boards that communicate over USB rather than Ethernet). Eventually, Quigley suggests that ROS 2 will be small and light enough to run on the microcontrollers inside sensors and actuators themselves, simplifying real-time control.

ROSCon 2015 Hamburg: Day 1 - Morgan Quigley: ROS 2 on "small" embedded systems from OSRF on Vimeo.