January 2017 Archives

From Ruben Smits via ROS Discourse

Dear ROS community,

For developers who want to write robotic applications on the Android platform, or who want to extend their robot with new sensors for indoor positioning and 3D perception, Intermodalics created the ROS Streamer App for Tango.

This Android app for Tango compatible devices provides real-time 3D pose estimates using Tango's visual-inertial odometry (VIO) algorithms, camera images and point clouds into the ROS ecosystem. The app and code are freely available for download in the Play Store and Github. More information can be found on the ROS wiki page. The application has been developed in close cooperation with Ekumen and Google.

Intermodalics is committed to maintain and improve the app, so stay tuned for new features and improvements. As an open source project we invite you to propose or contribute new features as well.

Future updates will contain even more Tango features such as area learning (SLAM) and 3D reconstruction.

We hope that this application and code will facilitate the use of Tango devices in robotic applications.

The Intermodalics Apps Team apps@intermodalics.eu

From Manos Tsardoulias

We are happy to announce the v0.6 version of RAPP Platform and RAPP API, oriented to provide an online platform for delivering ready-to-use generic cloud services to robots!

The changes in comparison to v0.5.5 follow:

• RAPP Platform Web services now support authentication via a tokens mechanism

• Several new functionalities were introduced in the form of ROS nodes along with the respectful API web calls. These include object recognition via a Caffe wrapper (http://caffe.berkeleyvision.org/), e-mail management, geolocator, hazard detection in a household environment (detects if lights were left on or doors open), human detection, news explorer, path planning and a weather reporter.

• Web services: Introduced a framework developed on-top of hop.js for easily implementing Web Services (documenation)

• Python Platform API was refactored, supporting high level API and advanced API implementations, as well as static request and response objects.

• RAPP Platform Wiki has been updated with the current description of all nodes, including full tutorials on how to create a new functionality, a new web service or even robotic applications.

• RAPP Platform scripts (installation and deployment) were transferred in a separate repository

You can download a ready-to-launch VM containing the RAPP Platform v0.6 from here. Furthermore RAPP Platform v0.6 is already publicly launched in the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki premises. You can find more information on how to invoke its cloud services here.

Links of interest:

• RAPP Project: http://rapp-project.eu/

• RAPP Platform GitHub repository: https://github.com/rapp-project/rapp-platform

• RAPP Platform wiki: https://github.com/rapp-project/rapp-platform/wiki

• RAPP API GitHub repository: https://github.com/rapp-project/rapp-api

• RAPP Platform documentation page: http://rapp-project.github.io/rapp-platform/

RAPP is a 3-year research project (2013-2016) funded by the European Commission through its FP7 programme, which provides an open source software platform to support the creation and delivery of robotic applications. Its technical objectives include the development of an infrastructure for developers of robotic applications, so they can easily build and include machine learning and personalization techniques to their applications, the creation of a repository from which robots can download Robotic Applications (RApps) and upload useful monitoring information, as well as developing a methodology for knowledge representation and reasoning in robotics and automation. More information on RAPP can be found at http://rapp-project.eu/.

From Davide Faconti

I would like to announce PlotJuggler, a Qt based application that allows the user to load, search and plot data. Many ROS user would use MATLAB or rqt_plot for this purpose, but these solutions might be frustrating to use when the data to be analyzed is considerably large.

PlotJuggler is meant to be a better alternative to rqtplot and rqtbag, providing a more user friendly interface.

Features:

• Multiplot: add multiple curves to a plot. Arrange plots in rows, columns, tabs and/or separate windows.

• Zoom: easily zoom a plot. You can lock the X axis of all of the plots.

• Save/Load layouts: one you have organized your layout, you can save it on a file to be reused later.

• Complete Undo/Redo: CTRL-Z does what you would expect it to do.

• DataLoad plugins: easily load CSV or rosbags.

• DataStreaming plugins: subscribe to one or multiple ros topic(s) and plot their data live.

• RosPublisher plugin: re-publish the original ROS messages using the interactive tracker.

You can get a first impression of how PlotJuggler works here

PlotJuggler: a desktop application to plot time series. from Davide Faconti on Vimeo.

PlotJuggler: live streaming of a ROS Topic from Davide Faconti on Vimeo.

PlotJuggler: loading and re-publishing messages from ROS bags from Davide Faconti on Vimeo.

PlotJuggler is still in its "alpha" stage and under heavy development. I would like to get some feedback from the community to understand how this tool need to evolve.

You can find the code here: https://github.com/facontidavide/PlotJuggler

NOTE: you will also need this package too https://github.com/facontidavide/rostypeintrospection