March 2017 Archives

To help with your planning for ROSCon 2017, here are some important dates (http://roscon.ros.org/2017/#important-dates):

• Call for Proposals circulated: April 24th, 2017
• Proposal submission deadline: June 25th, 2017
• Proposal acceptance notification: July 3rd, 2017
• Early registration deadline: August 1st, 2017
• Late registration starts: August 31st, 2017
• ROSCon 2017: September 21st-22nd, 2017

Travel information is coming together on the conference website: http://roscon.ros.org/2017/#location

And we're soliciting sponsors: http://roscon.ros.org/2017/#sponsors

We hope to see you at ROSCon 2017!

• Your friendly neighborhood ROSCon 2017 Organizing Committee http://roscon.ros.org/2017/#organizing-committee

From Patrick Wiesen via ROS Discourse

After 6 successful ROS Summer Schools we are offering another one this year at our University of Applied Sciences in Aachen (Germany). The event is planned from 14th August till 25th August 2017. Everyone who is interested in learning ROS is invited to register now! A limited funding for International students for this event is offered by the DAAD.

In the two weeks we are handling the following topics of mobile robotics more in detail: ROS Basics, Communication, Hardware Interfacing, Teleoperation, Transforms, Gazebo Simulation, Landmark Detection, Localization, Mapping, Navigation, Control, some Industrial exhibition and so on and so on. . . Of course all these topics can be experienced on real hardware using our mobile robots after learning the theory.

And if this is still not enough for you, we offer an additional ROS UAV weekend afterwards from 26th to 27th of August. This will include assembling UAVs, first flight setup, flight modes, ROS interfacing, Landmark Detection and getting in touch with autonomous flying. Feel free to choose this option in our application form. Application form, more information, photos and videos can be found on our homepage:

ROS Summer School FH Aachen

All is organized by MASCOR. The ROS Summer School is designed to teach participants about how to get started with ROS; it is created for those who have had an interest in autonomous systems, but didn't quite know how to get started. With that, organizers recommend students have a basic knowledge of Linux (Ubuntu) and one programming language such as Python or C++. The two-week program is made possible through Mobile Autonomous Systems and Cognitive Robotics (MASCOR).

From ROS-I

Southwest Research Institute is providing video editing services to create two separate video montages celebrating the anniversary of two respective ROS-based open source projects. Please visit the video submission page to upload your video for one of the following montages:

• ROS-Industrial (i.e. factory or manufacturing applications of ROS)
• MoveIt! (i.e. motion planning examples regardless of application/market)

Deadline: 28 March, 2017

Some guidelines for all video submissions:

• No cost for submission
• You will receive a link to upload upon submission of the form below
• Please name your files like this: JohnDoeCompanyName1.mp4, JohnDoeCompanyName2.mp4, etc.
• Any number of clips can be uploaded per person/organization
• Videos must be full HD quality or better to be used
• Portable device video must have adequate lighting and stabilization
• We prefer raw video that is not covered with text. borders, etc.
• We request that something interesting happens in 5 seconds or less, otherwise we reserve the right to accelerate the frame rate
• We interpret this submission as your consent to use your clip for this singular purpose. We will contact you if other use cases are desired.
• Don't forget to provide attribution/credit for all parties/collaborators involved in creating your video
• Use abbreviations for attributions/credits when possible to avoid line wrap
• If we are blessed to receive more submissions than we can fit in a short 2-3 min video, we will use the following criteria to select from among the available clips:
• Video quality (stable, in-focus, well-lit)
• Hardware diversity (robot/sensor brand variation among the ensemble of clips)
• Originality
• Professionalism (less duct tape, higher TRL)

From Lucas Walter via ROS Discourse

I saw ROS tools or heard mentions of ROS in many of the URC CDR videos that were uploaded a few weeks ago, this is a playlist of them:

I could have easily missed more instances in the other videos:

It's interesting to see all the variations on the rocker bogie suspension system, and there are a handful of exceptions that use more novel approaches (though more of them need to show off the rovers going up or down a real incline and over rough terrain).

http://urc.marssociety.org/home/team-info

From Barrett Williams

The brand-new NVIDIA Jetson TX2 Developer Kit runs ROS Kinetic!

Through its 256-core Pascal-based GPU that supports CUDA 8.0 and cuDNN 5.1, Jetson TX2 executes object classification, SLAM, and localization with low latency, short control loops, and at high framerates, all on a low power budget. In addition to 4 ARMv8 Cortex A57 cores, Jetson TX2 also sports two Denver cores for additional performance in single-threaded workloads.

Just as the Jetson TX1 before it, NVIDIA's new Jetson TX2 also supports ROS Kinetic Kame on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Xenial. Thanks to a partnership with OSRF, roboticists can now deploy Deep Learning on the most power efficient embedded platform available today. (TX2 sports a fresher 4.4 Linux kernel, which TX1 will receive in the coming months.)

Connect sensors and other peripherals over USB 3.0, Gigabit Ethernet (now built into the TX2 chip), PCI-Express (x4 or x2 + x1), I2C, CAN bus, or UART. Find custom carriers from Auvidea and Connect Tech to integrate in any chassis that can accommodate a credit card.

From the Toyota HSR to Fellow Robots' NAVii, some of the most sophisticated robots, drones, and intelligent machines on the market today run ROS on Jetson. What will you build around ROS Kinetic and Jetson TX2?

Learn here:

https://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/jetson-tx2-delivers-twice-intelligence-edge

https://github.com/dusty-nv/rosdeeplearning

https://github.com/mit-racecar/

https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/board/188/jetson-tx2/

https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/twodaystoademo

Buy here for $599 ($299 academic discount; EU pricing and discounts available now, APAC in April):

https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/buy/jetson-tx2-devkit

We're excited to announce the availability of the buildfarm for the next distribution of ROS, Lunar Loggerhead!

Current Status of the release: The targeted platforms and minimum requirements are specified in REP-003. As of today 114 packages have been released into Lunar with binaries available for Ubuntu Xenial, Yakkety and Zesty as well as Debian Stretch.

To make the release as convenient as possible for our beloved maintainers, we now have a status page keeping track of which repositories have been released compared to ROS Kinetic. This page allows you to see if your repositories are releasable, it also shows what dependencies are not satisfied (if any) and all the repositories depending on your repositories.

Call for action to all maintainers: Check the status page to see if you can already release your package, if yes, please consider getting a Lunar release out soon, if no, please use the lunar release category to coordinate with the maintainers of packages blocking your releases. Make sure that you have the latest version python-bloom and python-rosdistro before starting your release.

Please record any API changes or major behavioral changes in your package on the Migration wiki page for Lunar.

Once your package has been added to Lunar in rosdistro, you can generate a prerelease command on prerelease.ros.org. Before running the prerelease make sure that python-ros-buildfarm is up to date.

The Lunar release date is May 2017, but it's good to get started early (especially if many packages depend, directly or indirectly, on yours)!

Your friendly ROS Team

Announcement Thread

From Andriy Petlovanyy

The first Ukrainian ROS Meetup will be held Tuesday March 21st 2017 18:30.

Find us at:

Lohika company
(2-nd floor - Conference hall)
15 Lemkivska street
Lviv
Ukraine

The first ROS meeting in Ukraine is organised to begin an evolution of ROS Ukraine community. Both ROS enthusiasts and those beginning their journey into ROS are welcome.

To kick-start the meeting Andriy Petlovanyy from Shadow Robot Company will share some insights into the way they use ROS in their applications. Participation is free, just please register here

As you may have noticed we've stopped posting job listings on the blog here.

Since we've switched to using ROS Discourse to host ROS discussions we created a dedicated category for job postings.

If you're looking for job postings relating to ROS or would like to post a job posting please visit the category at https://discourse.ros.org/c/jobs.

Posting in the category also gets forwarded to ros-users as backwards compatibility.

For information on posting please see the About thread.

From Paul Hvass

Meeting to be held April 7 in Chicago

• Keynote speaker Matthew Robinson, Caterpillar
• Brett Hemes, 3M
• Trent Weiss, The Boeing Company
• Dr. Steve Turek, Manufacturing USA
• Tully Foote, OSRF
• Min Ling Chan, ARTC
• Mirko Bordignon, Fraunhofer IPA
• Paul Hvass, SwRI