June 2017 Archives

Reposted from the OSRF Blog

We are excited to show off a simulation of a Prius in Mcity using ROS Kinetic and Gazebo 8. ROS enabled the simulation to be developed faster by using existing software and libraries. The vehicle's throttle, brake, steering, and transmission are controlled by publishing to a ROS topic. All sensor data is published using ROS, and can be visualized with RViz.

We leveraged Gazebo's capabilities to incorporate existing models and sensors. The world contains a new model of Mcity and a freeway interchange. There are also models from the gazebo models repository including dumpsters, traffic cones, and a gas station. On the vehicle itself there is a 16 beam lidar on the roof, 8 ultrasonic sensors, 4 cameras, and 2 planar lidar.

The simulation is open source and available at on GitHub at osrf/car_demo. Try it out by installing nvidia-docker and pulling "osrf/car_demo" from Docker Hub. More information about building and running is available in the README in the source repository.

As a reminder, the deadline to submit a proposal to present at ROSCon 2017 is June 25, 2017.

Be sure to get your proposals in soon!

Read the call at http://roscon.ros.org/2017/#call-for-proposals You can submit by visiting http://roscon.ros.org/review

We look forward to reviewing your proposals.

Also, hotel accommodations are starting to sell out in Vancouver. If you're able to, please book your hotel for ROSCon soon: http://roscon.ros.org/2017/#location

Finally, we're still accepting sponsors for ROSCon 2017; check the prospectus for the remaining opportunities.

• Your friendly neighborhood ROSCon 2017 Organizing Committee

Thanks to our Platinum Sponsor: Intel.
Thanks to our Gold Sponsors: Clearpath, Erle, Fetch, GaiTech, Locus, and Rapyuta.

Looking foward to ROSCon 2017 we're highlighting presentations from last year. The ROSCon 2017 call for proposals is currently open as well as registration.

In this session Niharika Arora from gives an overview of how Fetch Robotics calibrates their robots using robot_calibration

Video

Abstract

Calibration is an essential prerequisite for nearly any robot. We have created a fast, accurate and robot­agnostic calibration system, which calibrates robot geometry in addition to the typical camera intrinsics and/or extrinsics. The system can be used with a variety of feature detectors to update the cost function and uses the CERES optimizer for the convex optimization. The system then creates an updated URDF containing the calibrated parameters. This talk will cover the details of the robot­agnostic robot_calibration package and describe its use in the fetch_calibration package which can calibrate dozens of parameters on a Fetch robot in as little as 3 minutes.

Slides

View the slides here

The ROSCon 2017 organizing committee aims for ROSCon to represent the entire ROS community, which is diverse and global. In addition to promoting technology that is open source, we also strive to ensure that our communities themselves are as open and accessible as possible, since we recognize that diversity benefits the ROS ecosystem as a whole.

Whoever you are, whatever you do, and wherever you do it, if you're interested in ROS, then we want you to join us at ROSCon. To help reduce the financial barriers to conference attendance, the ROSCon organizing committee is offering a number of scholarships to members of traditionally underrepresented groups in the tech community. Thanks to the support of the program's sponsors, these scholarships each include a complimentary conference registration pass and three nights' accommodation shared with another recipient*. Limited travel support is available for participants whose travel to the conference would otherwise be infeasible. Please note that all other expenses (including any visa requirements) will be the responsibility of the participant.

*To maximize the impact of the scholarship funds, scholarship recipients will be asked to share a room with another recipient. Under special circumstances alternative arrangements can be accommodated.

Eligibility

We invite applications from members of groups that have been traditionally underrepresented in the tech community (including but not limited to: women, LGBTQ+, people of color, people with disabilities, and people from ethnic minorities in their country of residence), who may not otherwise be able to attend ROSCon. Previous ROSCon Diversity Scholarship recipients are not eligible to re-apply.

Sponsors

The ROSCon 2017 Diversity Program has been made possible with support from the following sponsors:

If your organization is interested in getting involved in the Diversity Program, please get in contact.

How to apply

To apply, fill out this form by June 25, describing how you are involved with ROS and the robotics community and what you hope to get out of attending ROSCon. Scholarships will be awarded based on a combination of need and impact. Every applicant will be notified of the outcome of their application.

For more information about ROSCon 2017, including the program, code of conduct, and childcare options, please see http://roscon.ros.org/2017

Continuing our series highlighting ROSCon 2016 talks. We present Matthiew Amy talking about how to build fault tolerant systems. He first covers the theory and then goes into specifics for how to make ROS systems robust.

Video

Abstract

Every system evolves during their operational lifetime. A system that remains dependable when facing changes (new threats, failures, updates) is called resilient. We propose an approach to safety and adaptive fault tolerance taking advantage of Component-Based Software Engineering technologies for tackling a crucial aspect of resilient computing, namely the on-line adaptation of fault tolerance mechanisms. We will show how this approach can be implemented on ROS and explain some implementation details and the result of different experiments to validate the solution. We will also discuss the how we can use checkpointing technologies to make the ROS master crash-tolerant

Slides

pdf

ROSCon 2017

If you're interested in more information like this ROSCon 2017 is coming up! The call for proposals is currently open as well as registration.