Looking foward to ROSCon 2018 we're highlighting presentations from last year. The ROSCon 2018 registration is currently open. Early registration ends August 11th!

Ian and Louise continued talking about simulation however it moved from terrestrial to a martian setting. And if you didn't notice the entire presentation was done inside of gazebo.

Video

Abstract

Over the past year, hundreds of teams competed in the qualifications for the NASA Space Robotics Challenge, and the top 20 teams competed in the final cloud­based competition. This talk will go over the software and infrastructure used to host the Space Robotics Challenge, which includes the use of ROS, Gazebo and CloudSim. We will also describe some of the technical challenges faced during the competition, including simulation modeling, performance tuning, and cloud deployment.

Slides

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Looking foward to ROSCon 2018 we're highlighting presentations from last year. The ROSCon 2018 registration is currently open.

Ian and Carlos started the second afternoon session talking about simulating vehicles and cities.

Video

Abstract

Autonomous driving is becoming a popular area of robotics, attracting interests from the research community and industry alike. Open Robotics have received increasing demands for resources to help build vehicle simulations in Gazebo. In this presentation, we will describe our recent efforts on vehicle and city simulation. We have produced a collection of components, including 3D vehicle models, materials and plugins, a Road Network Description File library, and a procedural city generation tool. We will showcase a demo with ROS interface and rviz visualization, and describe how users can create their own vehicle simulations with these components

Slides

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Looking foward to ROSCon 2018 we're highlighting presentations from last year. The ROSCon 2018 registration is currently open.

Finishing the first afternoon session Chris Osterwood provided an overview of different 3D sensing technologies and how to evaluate them.

Video

Abstract

System developers are faced with a new challenge when designing robots - which 3D perception technology to use? There are a wide variety of sensors on the market, which employ modalities including stereo, ToF cameras, LIDAR, and monocular 3D technologies. This talk will include an overview of various 3D sensor modalities, their general capabilities and limitations, a review of our controlled environment and field testing processes, and some surprising characteristics and limitations we've uncovered through that testing. There is no perfect sensor, but there is always a sensor which best aligns with application requirements - you just need to find it.

Slides

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Looking foward to ROSCon 2018 we're highlighting presentations from last year. The ROSCon 2018 registration is currently open.

Continuing the afternoon session Juraj Kabzan continues the theme of cars and brings it to Formula Student Driverless racing.

Video

Abstract

As AMZ Racing Driverless, we're competing in the first Formula Student Driverless competition with «flüela», an electric 4WD car with high wheel torque and a lightweight design (0-100km/h in 1.9s), developed by our team in 2015. To race autonomously, the car has been extended with a LiDAR, a self-developed stereo visual-inertial system, an IMU, a GPS and a velocity sensor. We chose to use ROS Indigo on our Master Slave computing system, as it provided a robust, flexible framework to interface the different components of our Autonomous System. Furthermore we made extensive use of its logging capabilities and powerful visualization and simulation tools.

Slides

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Looking foward to ROSCon 2018 we're highlighting presentations from last year. The ROSCon 2018 registration is currently open.

After lunch Andreas Fregin started the afternoon session talking about how they've leveraged ROS for computer vision at Daimler.

Video

Abstract

Daimler (Mercedes-Benz) has a long history on research and development on ADAS systems and autonomous driving. Today's increasing complex requirements on sensors, algorithms and fusion put high demands on the underlying software framework. In this talk, the group Pattern Recognition and Cameras of Daimler Research and Development showcase their latest research vehicle. Additionally, a detailed look on an implemented multi-sensor synchronization system is given. Findings and lessons learned as well as tool modifications and added functionality will be discussed as well. The audience will get insights on data handling in the context of high data throughput.

Slides

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We're happy to announce the ROS 2 release Bouncy Bolson!

Check out our installation instructions and tutorials and give it a try! We're excited to hear your feedback and the applications that this release will enable!

To get an idea of what's in this release, be sure to read the Bouncy release page.

A few features and improvements we would like to highlight in this release:

• New and improved ROS 2 Launch.
• Static remapping of node names/topics and passing of parameters via the command line.
• New command line tools for working with lifecycle states and parameters.
• Adoption of colcon as the recommended build tool.
• Support for all three supported RMW implementations from binaries.
• Foundational work toward a ROS 2-native rosbag implementation.
• Multitude of RViz displays ported to ROS 2.
• Security: Access Control support now available for eProsima Fast-RTPS in addition to RTI Connext.
• Support for 3rd party package submission and "devel jobs" on the ROS 2 build farm.

Bouncy Bolson is the second non-beta ROS 2 release and will be supported with bug fixes and platform updates (particularly on rolling dependencies like Windows and MacOS) for one year with support ending in June 2019. While we do aim to keep the API as stable as possible, we can't guarantee 100% API compatibility between releases. Check the features page and ROS 2 roadmap to evaluate whether or not ROS 2 is ready to be used for your application or if you can switch from ROS 1 to ROS 2 as it will depend on the exact feature set and requirements of your use case.

As always, we invite you to try out the new software, give feedback, report bugs, and suggest features (and contribute code!): https://github.com/ros2/ros2/wiki/Contact We also invite you to release your ROS 2 packages in Bouncy! Here's a tutorial to do so.

We would also like to announce the name of the next ROS 2 release: Crystal Clemmys

Your friendly ROS 2 Team

P.S. There's still a few days left on the t-shirt campaign.