September 2017 Archives

After a gorgeous and enlightening couple of days in Vancouver, we bid farewell to ROSCon 2017. We sold out ROSCon for the third year in a row, with over 475 attendees.

Thanks to everyone for coming and for your support! And thank you to our record-breaking 33 sponsors for the financial support that enabled the conference to grow!

We're posting the slides as they come in from the speakers and we expect to have the videos posted by October 6th. As usual, all of that material is linked in the program.

Looking foward to ROSCon 2017 we're highlighting presentations from last year. The ROSCon 2017 registration is currently open.

In this presentation Ian talks about how CloudSim was developed and used to support the DARPA Virtual Robotics Challenge.

Video

Abstract

The DARPA Virtual Robotics Challenge gave birth to the first version of CloudSim. It provided a centralized platform that facilitated teams of participants from around the world to compete in simulation simultaneously. Since then, various projects have demanded the need for a similar cloud hosted environment for robotics competitions. In this presentation, we reveal a new, redesigned CloudSim that aims to be a generic tool for running robotics software and simulations on the cloud. We present some of its key features including simulation instance sharing, reusable front-end web components, a WebGL visualization client, and security and authentication.

Slides

View the slides here

Looking foward to ROSCon 2017 we're highlighting presentations from last year. The ROSCon 2017 registration is currently open.

Mike Purvis presents how to build bundles and use them for deploying robots with ROS software.

Video

Abstract

Late in 2015, Clearpath was facing a deployment crisis, with software in various states going to customer sites, off-site demos, in-house demos & testing, and developer workstations. There was a build-up of cultural issues and technical limitations in the existing tooling. The solution to all of these issues has been to build the entirety of our robot's software in a single large workspace (using catkintools), and then ship the whole thing as one "fat" deb package. Lessons learned will be presented, along with a brief example of building a customized desktopfull bundle for Ubuntu - this should be sufficient to kickstart the efforts of anyone else who'd like to set up a similar build. The demonstration will highlight in particular our contributions to upstream ROS tooling which have been made in the course of this development work, hopefully merged in coming months

Slides

View the slides here