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We've decided to retire the ROS New blog here.
We now have a better way of getting the news from the ROS community via ROS Discourse.
We recommend the General Channel you can browse it directly.
You can also create an account and subscribe to General or many of the other categories.
If you've been accessing this site via rss Discourse provides an rss feed as well You may also be interested in the feed from planet.ros.org which includes this as well as content from other ROS sources.
We're happy to announce the ROS 2 release Crystal Clemmys!
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!
Our ROS 2 distros, they grow up so fast. With the release of Crystal Clemmys we also bid farewell to Ardent Apalone which will retire with 191 packages, and Crystal is debuting with almost 300 (297 to be precise)!
To get an idea of what's in this release, be sure to read the Crystal release page.
A few features and improvements we would like to highlight in this release:
Crystal Clemmys is the third 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 December 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://index.ros.org/doc/ros2/Contact
We also invite you to release your ROS 2 packages in Crystal! Here's a tutorial to do so. A huge thanks to all those who've already participated in our pre-release testing and packaging effort.
We would also like to announce the name of the next ROS 2 release scheduled for June 2019:
Dashing Diademata
Your friendly ROS 2 Team
P.S. There's still a couple of weeks left on the T-Shirt campaign.
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:
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.
Greetings ROS users,
Happy World Turtle Day! :turtle: [1]
I am pleased to announce that the 12th ROS distribution, Melodic Morenia [2], is now available on Ubuntu Bionic 18.04, Ubuntu Artful 17.10, and Debian Stretch. 32-bit ARM (armhf) packages are available on Bionic, and 64-bit ARM (aarch64) packages are available for Ubuntu Bionic and Debian Stretch.
To install ROS Melodic, refer to the Installation page on the Wiki:
http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/Installation
There are a couple of Release notes to be aware of while installing Melodic:
Check out the Migration guide for a changelog of new features and API changes:
http://wiki.ros.org/melodic/Migration
465 packages in the ROS ecosystem are in the initial release of Melodic, compared to 2020 currently in Kinetic. You can see the released packages on the status page for Melodic:
http://repositories.ros.org/statuspage/rosmelodic_default.html
And you can compare the versions of packages in Melodic and other active ROS distributions here:
http://repositories.ros.org/statuspage/comparekinetic_melodic.html
http://repositories.ros.org/statuspage/compareindigokineticlunar_melodic.html
If there's a package missing in Melodic that you'd like to see released, please: * check if the package can be released here:
http://repositories.ros.org/statuspage/blockedreleases_melodic.html * contact the maintainers to let them know: * by opening an issue on the source repository * posting on the ROS discourse release category: https://discourse.ros.org/c/release
Even though we've made the initial Melodic release, it's never too late to add packages to Melodic (or Lunar, Kinetic, or Indigo) for upcoming syncs.
Melodic T-shirts (and hoodies) should come through in the mail this week.
We'd also like to announce the name of the next ROS distribution:
Noetic Ninjemys
Thank you to all of the maintainers and contributors who helped make this release possible. We couldn't do this without you.
Chris and the ROS Team
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldTurtleDay [2] http://wiki.ros.org/melodic
The ROSCon 2018 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[1]. Limited travel support is available for participants whose travel to the conference would otherwise be infeasible[2]. Please note that all other expenses (including any visa requirements) will be the responsibility of the participant.
We invite applications from members of groups that have been traditionally underrepresented in the robotics community (including but not limited to: women, LGBTQ+, people of color, people with disabilities, people from racial and/or ethnic minorities in the robotics community, and people from developing nations), who may not otherwise be able to attend ROSCon.
Previous ROSCon Diversity Scholarship recipients are not eligible to re-apply, but we are proud to share this feedback from a participant of the 2017 Diversity Program:
The ROSCon Diversity Scholarship Program provided me with an opportunity that would have been completely impossible without it. I was able to attend my first robotics conference and feel empowered to keep working to try and make a positive impact on this community. Also, it was very encouraging to see so many companies stepping up to promote and enable diversity within their companies and the robotics community. Thank you!
The ROSCon 2018 Diversity Program is made possible with support from the following sponsors:
If your organization is interested in getting involved in the Diversity Program, please get in contact.
To apply, fill out this form by May 6 2018, 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 2018, including the program, code of conduct, and childcare options, please see http://roscon.ros.org/2018
Thank you to the conference Platinum Sponsor, Erle, and to our Gold Sponsors: Amazon, Clearpath, Fetch Robotics, Google, Locus, ROBOTIS, Tier IV, Universal Robots.
With each release of ROS we have a tradition of having a logo and making t-shirts. ROS Melodic Morenia is coming out in May. To let you show your ROS colors and support this tradition, we have setup a Teespring Campaign in both the US and the EU. Note that both these campaigns can ship worldwide.
Ordering will be open until May 8th. Order now!
Since this is the first public announcement, here's the full graphic for Melodic Morenia.
Thanks to everyone who's been helping prepare the Melodic release. We're looking forward to the release in May. We expect the tshirts ordered in this campaign will arrive just before ROS Melodic Morenia is released!
We're happy to announce the ROS 2 release Ardent Apalone!
Installation instructions and tutorials can be found on the ROS 2 wiki.
To get an idea of what's in this release, be sure to read the Ardent page.
A few features and improvements we would like to highlight in this release:
rviz including a few plugins (the Windows version will follow in a few weeks)While there is always more work to be done we consider several of the core components to be ready to be used by a broader audience. Therefore we have dropped the "beta" label and will support Ardent for one year, fixing bugs and keeping the release working, especially on platforms with rolling dependency releases (OS X / Windows). We'll start a regular six month release cycle for newer versions of ROS 2. While we do aim to keep the API as stable as possible, we can't guarantee 100% API compatibility between releases. That being said, whether or not ROS 2 is ready to be used for your application or if you can switch from ROS 1 to ROS 2 right now depends on the exact feature set and requirements of your use case. Please check the features page as well as the roadmap for more information.
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
Your friendly neighborhood ROS 2 Team
We're happy to be celebrating the 10th anniversary of ROS today!
On this date in 2007 the first commit was made to the ROS project on SourceForge.
Since then, ROS has grown from that first public commit to over 200000 commits made by more than 2800 individuals from around the world. These contributions have built up to over 4.5 million significant lines of code which - following standard development effort estimators - would take 169 full time developers 8.5 years.
As an open source community it's sometimes very hard to quantify the involvement in the project. To help measure what we can, we started putting together an annual Metrics report. Using these snapshots the progress of ROS is quite striking.
Charting the information over time can be seen in this post. Showing things like Monthly Unique IPs or Total Downloads year over year.
This year being a large anniversary we're happy to see that there are many others who are recognizing this historic milestone. There is already coverage in Science Robotics, , ZDNet and IEEE Spectrum
To help highlight the greater ROS community we've running a series of blog posts about some of the ROS Contributors who have helped grow the community.
Another way that we're celebrating is by making anniversary edition t-shirts available for CTurtle, Indigo, and Kinetic. You can order from the:
CTurtle was our first release with a full logo. And Indigo and Kinetic are our new current Long Term Support Releases. Get your anniversary shirt to support the ROS community by showing how many of us there are. This is a limited campaign and will end on November 21.
Of course if you'd rather have stickers, they are available from Sticker Mule.
For those of us involved in ROS since its inception, these last 10 years have gone by in the blink of an eye. We've gone from a first commit to an industry standard. The enthusiasm of this community, the creativity of the work already accomplished, and the plans to come all combine to paint a very bright picture of the future of ROS. All of us at Open Robotics and very much looking forward to the next 10 years, and beyond.
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.
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.
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.
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
We're excited to announce that we are now accepting presentation proposals for ROSCon 2017!
Presentations on all topics related to ROS are invited. Examples include introducing attendees to a ROS package or library, exploring how to use tools, manipulating sensor data, and applications for robots.
Women, members of minority groups, and members of other under-represented groups are encouraged to submit presentation proposals to ROSCon.
Proposals will be reviewed by a program committee that will evaluate fit, impact, and balance.
We cannot offer presentations that are not proposed! If there is a topic on which you would like to present, please propose it. If you have an idea for an important topic that you do not want to present yourself, please post it for discussion at ROS Discourse. Topic areas
All ROS-related work is invited. Topics of interest include:
To get an idea of the content and tone of ROSCon, check out the slides and videos from last year.
Proposal format
A session proposal must include:
Please be sure to include in your proposal enough information for the program committee to evaluate the importance and impact of your presentation. Links to publicly available resources, including code repositories and demonstration videos, are especially helpful.
Submit your proposal at the submissions site by June 25, 2017.
We are happy to announce that Qualifier 3 is now open for the Agile Robotics for Industrial Automation Competition (ARIAC)!
ARIAC is a simulation-based competition is designed to promote agility in industrial robot systems by utilizing the latest advances in artificial intelligence and robot planning. The goal is to enable industrial robots on the shop floors to be more productive, more autonomous, and to require less time from shop floor workers. You can learn more about the competition here. The top performing teams will be invited to present at a workshop held during IROS 2017 in Vancouver.
So far we have completed Qualifiers 1 and 2, highlights of which you can see here:
and here:
While the first two Qualifiers are now closed, there's still time to join the competition. You have until May 15, 2017 to submit your results from Qualifier 3 and secure a spot in the final competition, to be held in early June. To learn how to participate, visit the ARIAC site.
This year marks the occasion of ROS turning 9 years old! Through these years ROS has grown into a strong world-wide community. It's a community with a large variety of interests: from academic researchers to robotic product developers as well as the many robot users. Academic use of ROS continues to grow. Citations of the first ROS paper "ROS: An Open-Source Robot Operating System" has grown to 2,871.
To get a better sense of what's happening in the ROS community, if you have not already done so, I highly recommend reviewing the ROSCon 2016 program. You can also find all the video recordings in this gallery. ROSCon 2016 was another great event bringing ROS community members together to share how they're using ROS to solve their challenges. As the goal of ROSCon is to share information between the entire community we record the talks and make them available online. We've sold out our venues the last two years and are looking forward to another ROSCon next fall!
Part of understanding our growing community is to try to measure it. For the last 6 years we've been generating metrics reports. These reports can give a sense of aggregate what's happening in the ROS community. Our most recent report is from July 2016. David Lu has put together plots of several of the metrics across the last 6 years which can be quite informative.
This year we wanted to dig a little deeper into the code metrics, so we downloaded the source of all of packages listed in the Indigo Igloo rosdistro and ran some analysis.
You can see the commits as a function of month in this graph.
Our committers are active around the world as evidenced by the commits coming in at all hours of the day.
And the git commits record 24 different time zones (out of 39 possible).
Analyzing the repository for significant lines of code using SLOCCount shows:
For those of you curious about the breakdown by language lines of code, it is as follows:
This only represents the packages publicly released into the Indigo rosdistro index.
Note that the tools only worked on Git repos so code from other source control systems was excluded. There are also a few projects which predate ROS but have ported to use ROS and their history is included.
We're looking forward to continuing growth through 2017 leading up to the 10-year anniversary of ROS. With the Beta 1 version of ROS 2.0 out, there will be space for new development. We're looking forward to our next release, Lunar Loggerhead, to coincide with Ubuntu's next release, Zesty Zapus. With both of these, the ROS community can continue to rely on the many libraries, tools, and capabilities they have come to know and enjoy, as well as begin to experiment with the new features in ROS 2.0
Another exciting project to watch is the upcoming TurtleBot 3! The TurtleBot and TurtleBot 2 have been great platforms for learning and prototyping. However by packing that same capability into a smaller platform with more punch we look forward to it providing another avenue to grow the ROS community.
We write these anniversary posts to help give you a sense of how ROS has been doing over the past year, but we'd certainly encourage you to find out for yourself. Get involved. Write or edit a wiki page. Answer a question on ROS Answers. Come to ROSCon. And, when you're ready, think about helping to maintain ROS itself, or even contributing a brand new ROS package.
OSRF is doing great, but the long-term success of ROS depends on every member of the incredibly awesome ROS community. If you're already an active part of the ROS community, we can't thank you enough; and if you're not, think about how you can help ROS grow and thrive for the next nine years, and beyond.
From Medium:
Announcing alpha support for the PX4 flight stack in a path towards drones that speak ROS natively
The drones field is an interesting one to analyze from a robotics perspective. While capable flying robots are reasonably new, RC-hobbyists have been around for a much longer time building flying machines developing communities around the so called flight stacks or software autopilots.
Among these, there're popular options such as the Paparazzi, the APM (commonly known as ardupilot) or the PX4. These autopilots matured to the point of acquiring autonomous capabilities and turning these flying machines into actual drones. Many of these open source flight stacks provide a general codebase for building basic drone behaviors however modifications are generally needed when one has the intention of tackling traditional problems in robotics such as navigation, mapping, obstacle avoidance and so on. These modifications are not straightforward when performed directly in the autopilot code thereby, in an attempt to enhance (or sometimes just simplify) the capabilities of autopilots, abstraction layers such as DroneKit started appearing.
For a roboticist however, the common language is the Robot Operating System (ROS). Getting ROS to talk to these flight stacks natively would require a decent amount of resources and effort thereby, generally, roboticists use a bridge such as the mavros ROS package to talk to the flight stacks.
We at Erle Robotics have been offering services with flying robots using such architecture but we've always wondered what would be the path towards a ROS-native drone. In order to explore this possibility we've added support for the PX4 Pro flight stack.
Supporting the PX4 Pro flight stack
The PX4 Pro drone autopilot is an open source (BSD) flight control solution for drones that can "fly anything from a racing to a cargo drone?--?be it a multi copter, plane or VTOL". PX4 has been built with a philosophy similar to ROS, composed by different software blocks where each one of these modules communicates using a publish/subscribe architecture (currently, a simplified pub/sub middleware called uORB).
In an internal attempt to research the path of getting ROS-native flight stacks and to open up this work to the community I'm happy to announce official alpha support for the PX4 Pro in all our products meant for developers such as the PXFmini, Erle-Brain 2 or Erle-Copter. Our team has put together a new set of Operating System images for our products that will help you switch between flight stacks easily.
To install PX4 Pro, just type the following:
sudo apt-get purge -y apm-* # e.g.: apm-copter-erlebrain
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install px4-erle-robotics
ROS-native flight stacks
Using the PX4 Pro flight stack as a starting point, our team will be dedicating resources to prototype the concept of a drone autopilot that speaks ROS natively, that is, that uses ROS nodes to abstract each submodule within the autopilot's logic (attitude estimator, position control, navigator, ...) and ROS topics/services to communicate with the rest of the blocks within the autopilot. Ultimately, this initiative should deliver a software autopilot capable of creating a variety of drones that merges nicely with all the traditional ROS interfaces that roboticists have been building for over a decade now.
If you're interested in participating with this initiative, reach us out at http://erlerobotics.com/blog/contact/.
Originally published in Medium:
I'm delighted to announce a new game-changing standard for building robot components, H-ROS: the Hardware Robot Operating System. H-ROS provides manufacturers tools for building interoperable robot components that can easily be exchanged or replaced between robots.
H-ROS is about supporting a common environment of robot hardware components, where manufacturers comply with standard interfaces built upon ROS.
Powered by the popular Robot Operating System (ROS) and built with industry and developers in mind, H-ROS classifies robot components in 5 types: sensing?--?used to perceive the world, actuation?--?allow interaction with the environment, communication?--?provide a means of interconnection, cognition?--?the brain of the robot and hybrid?--?components that group together different sub-components under a common interface. This building-block-style parts come as reusable and reconfigurable components allowing developers, to easily upgrade their robots with hardware from different manufacturers and add new features in seconds.
Building a robot is accepted as a harsh task thereby it makes sense to reuse previous work to reduce this complexity. Unfortunately, nowadays there are little efforts that reuse hardware in both academy and industry. Robots are generally built by multidisciplinary teams (generally a whole research group or a company division) where different engineers get involved in the mechanical, electrical and logical design. Most of the time is spent dealing with the hardware/software interfaces and little is put into behavior development or real-world scenarios. Existing hardware platforms, although starting to become more common, lack extensibility.
Examples can be seen in several commercial and industrial robots that hit the market recently and already include a common software infrastructure (generally the Robot Operating System(ROS)) but lack of a hardware standard.
With H-ROS, building robots will be about placing H-ROS-compatible hardware components together to build new robot configurations. Constructing robots won't be restricted to a few with high technical skills but it will be extended to a great majority with a general understanding of the sensing and actuation needed in a particular scenario.
H-ROS was initially funded by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) through the Robotics Fast Track program in 2016. It is now available for selected industry partners and will soon be released for the wider robotics community. Additional information can be requested through its official web page at https://h-ros.com/. H-ROS was first unveiled and showcased at ROSCon 2016 (October 8th-9th) in Seoul, South Korea.
The ROSCon 2016 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. These scholarships will include a complimentary conference registration pass and two nights' twin-share* accommodation. Please note that all other expenses (including travel and 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.
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.
How to apply
To apply, please fill out this form by the 14th of August, describing how you are involved with ROS and the robotics community and what you hope to get out of attending ROSCon 2016. Scholarships will be awarded based on a combination of need and impact. Every applicant will be notified of the outcome of their application by the 20th of August.
For more information about ROSCon 2016, including the program, code of conduct, and childcare options, please see http://roscon.ros.org/2016/
Counting ROSBecause of the nature of the ROS license, we actually don't know how many users, robots, and developers there are utilizing ROS. Many of the numbers that we are citing throughout are likely to be much larger. For example, we specifically know of approximately 80 types of robots using ROS, but almost every day we hear about new ones. And not every company using ROS discloses so publicly, so our estimates on venture capital investment can be better characterized as lower bounds than estimates.
Yaskawa
Motoman Robotics is pleased to announce sponsorship of the Amazon
Picking Challenge to
be held in conjunction with ICRA 2015. This open competition will
further the development of robot skills required for e-commerce and
other material handling. Yaskawa Motoman is offering consignment
robots to select teams entering the challenge. Selected teams will
receive their choice of robot model in January, 2015 and may keep
them through June, subject to model availability. To apply for a
Motoman consignment robot, please submit the following items via
this form by
midnight PST December
17, 2014 January
16, 2015 (extended deadline).
Video of a simulated robot executing a picking task
Link to your team/organization website
Completed application describing your Motoman hardware utilization plan
Yaskawa Motoman will provide robots, software (including our MotoROS driver), and onsite technical support both at the team's location and the event.
To support your development efforts, the ROS-Industrial Consortium will be updating its pick and place tutorial to include the Motoman MH5 II model. The tutorial will also be updated to ROS Indigo.
Additional resource links:
When we started the ROS project back in 2007, our goal was to build an open robotics software platform for students, engineers, entrepreneurs, and anyone else to freely use and modify. In 2012, we took the next step by founding OSRF as an independent non-profit organization to pursue that mission, with responsibility for both ROS and Gazebo. Today, we see these tools used worldwide to teach concepts, solve problems, and build products in ways that we couldn't have imagined at the beginning.
We couldn't be happier with the size and breadth of the collaborative community that we've built together, and we're grateful to everyone in the community for the roles that you've played.
You won't be surprised to hear that it costs money to run OSRF. We employ a small team of amazing individuals, we operate an office in the Bay Area, and we run a suite of online services on which the community depends.
Since our founding, OSRF has enjoyed generous financial support from government agencies and private industry, for which we're very grateful. We hope and anticipate that that support will continue in the future. But now, as we approach the end of OSRF's third year, we're trying something new: asking you, our users, for support.
If you rely on ROS and/or Gazebo in your lab, your startup company, your weekend projects, or elsewhere, please consider donating to OSRF. Your donation will support our people and infrastructure so that we can spend (even) more time developing and maintaining the software and services on which you depend.
As one example, if everyone who visits the ROS wiki between now and the end of the year donates just $2, we'll have our costs covered for next year to manage, update, and host all of our online services, including the wiki. Donations in any amount are welcome. Give more, and we can do more.
Thank you for your support.
Contributions to the Open Source Robotics Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, will be used at its discretion for its charitable purposes. Such donations are tax-deductible in the U.S. to the extent permitted by law.
From Anis Koubaa via ros-users@
I am coordinating with Springer publisher to edit a handbook on Robot Operating System. There are only a few books on ROS http://wiki.ros.org/Books which mainly represent a brief introduction to ROS and a few basic applications. This does not translate the huge amount of work being done in the community and I feel the need to have a complete reference on the topic.
The prospective handbook will cover ROS from foundations and basics to advanced research works from both academia and industry. Tutorials and research papers will both be sought. The book should cover several robotics areas including but not limited to robot navigation, UAVs, arm manipulation, multi-robot communication protocols, Web and mobile interfaces using ROS, integration of new robotic platform to ROS, computer vision applications, development of service robots using ROS, development of new libraries and packages for ROS, etc. Every book chapter should be accompanied with a working code to be put later in a common repository for the readers.
To express your interest to the handbook and your intention of a chapter proposal, I would like to invite you fill in the following form. The proposed chapters are just considered as an initial expression of interest and will be included in the handbook proposal. It does not mean any kind of commitment for the author at this stage. An official call for chapters with instructions and deadline will be announced soon.
Thank you and look forward to receive your feedback,
Anis
NavVis presents new large scale mapping technology: The impressive shipping exhibition at Deutsches Museum can now be explored online and in 3D.
NavVis utilizes a trolley that's equipped with three laser scanners and six cameras. As a human operator wheels that trolley through the area to be mapped, the scanners record the horizontal and vertical dimensions of the hallway while the cameras record panoramas. The software framework is based on ROS, which allowed for a very modular design, as Suat Gedikli, Chief Software Architect at NavVis, says. One of the main advantages of their mapping device is its efficiency: In contrast to Google's mapping trolley, the operator does not have to crouch to move out of the field of view of the panoramic camera. With the patented NavVis camera head, the six cameras are assembled in a way such that the trolley operator is in their blind spot and therefore not visible. Hence 360-degree panoramas can be continuously recorded while moving the trolley.
![[NavVis]TrolleyM3_total_3.png](http://www.ros.org/news/assets_c/2014/10/[NavVis]TrolleyM3_total_3-thumb-480x317-966.png)
The start-up recently teamed up with Deutsches Museum to digitize their impressive shipping exhibitions, which were mapped in less than one hour. The result is a 3D map of the exhibition, overlaid with photos of every square inch of all the surfaces.
Similar to Google Street View, their HTML5 based IndoorViewer allows people to virtually explore the museum online. Additionally, administrators can add content like text, images, video to various points on the map, which can then be accessed by users. This interactive feature also lets users do things like obtaining measurements between different points in the building (which is important for architects and in construction site monitoring applications).
NavVis, which was only founded in May of last year, is focused on public-oriented showcases and business-to-business applications. Felix Reinshagen, co-founder and managing director: "As the first step, our application is aimed at companies in the building management segment that are confronted with challenges such as documentation, inventory, path-finding and task management. We make our hardware, software and service available to them so that they can have their building and industrial plants digitized while handling the usage of their data according to their own requirements. An area the size of the Deutsches Museum is mapped and posted online within three working days for a four-figure amount."
We're happy to announce that SICK has donated hardware to OSRF for the ROS community to use in testing and development. We're now the proud owners of one each of the following laser scanners: TiM551, LMS111, and LMS511.
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This generous donation was motivated by SICK's longstanding commitment to robotics, combined with their desire to see first-class support for their sensors in ROS. The LMS series is best known for providing reliable LiDAR data in tough conditions including the DARPA Urban Challenge and Boston Dynamics' LS3 AlphaDog. The TiM is a smaller version designed for great performance with low power consumption in indoor or outdoor environments.
The sensors are available for loan to members of the ROS community who want to use them for testing and development, and especially for improvement of the ROS drivers and associated tools. If you'd like to borrow one of these devices to try it out in your project, please let us know: info@osrfoundation.org
Thank you to our friends at SICK, and we look forward to even more robotics applications that are enabled by SICK sensors and ROS software!
Hi Everyone,
We're pleased to announce the official release of ROS Indigo Igloo! This is the first LTS release of ROS; it will be supported until April 2019 in parallel with Ubuntu Trusty Tahr. It will also be available for Saucy Salamander during its duration of support from Canonical as outlined in the ROS Distributions page.
Thanks to our many active maintainers it can be seen on the Indigo Igloo build status page that 643 packages have already been released for Indigo Igloo. And we expect this number to continuously grow over the lifetime of the distribution.
The main focus of Indigo development has been to clean up the core packages in preparation for the LTS support cycle. Efforts have included integrating the ROS packages with packages officially taken up into the upstream Debian and Ubuntu repositories such as console_bridge, urdfdom, and OpenCV.
With the release of Indigo, development will be transitioned forward to the next ROS release, Jade Turtle. ROS Jade Turtle will be targeted for release in May 2015, following the new 12 month release cycle. Also with the beginning of development for Jade Turtle, Groovy Galapagos will reach its end-of-life. Releases into Groovy have been winding down and in the near future the build infrastructure for Groovy will be taken offline.
To get started with Indigo see the installation page. A summary of updates for packages can be found in the migration guide.
Although Indigo is now officially available, ROS distributions are living entities built on the contributions of the community. Hydro Medusa has almost doubled the number of packages available since it was initially released 9 months ago, and Indigo is tracking a similar trajectory through it's development phases.
We'd also like to take a moment to thank the many contributors to the community who improve documentation on the wiki as well as answering questions and moderating on answers.ros.org. One of the things that distinguishes ROS is the large helpful community. We now have dozens of moderators and thousands of contributors, thank you all for your contributions!
Details of the latest updated packages in Indigo are listed below as well as updated packages for Hydro.
Your ROS Indigo Igloo Release Team
Updates to indigo
Added Packages [43]:
* ros-indigo-ax2550: 0.1.1-0
* ros-indigo-gazebo-ros-control: 2.4.4-0
* ros-indigo-image-exposure-msgs: 0.9.2-0
* ros-indigo-nav2d: 0.1.3-0
* ros-indigo-nav2d-exploration: 0.1.3-0
* ros-indigo-nav2d-karto: 0.1.3-0
* ros-indigo-nav2d-localizer: 0.1.3-0
* ros-indigo-nav2d-msgs: 0.1.3-0
* ros-indigo-nav2d-navigator: 0.1.3-0
* ros-indigo-nav2d-operator: 0.1.3-0
* ros-indigo-nav2d-remote: 0.1.3-0
* ros-indigo-nav2d-tutorials: 0.1.3-0
* ros-indigo-ntpd-driver: 1.0.1-0
* ros-indigo-orocos-kinematics-dynamics: 1.3.0-0
* ros-indigo-pointgrey-camera-driver: 0.9.2-0
* ros-indigo-rosh: 1.0.5-0
* ros-indigo-rosh-common: 1.0.1-0
* ros-indigo-rosh-core: 1.0.5-0
* ros-indigo-rosh-desktop: 1.0.2-0
* ros-indigo-rosh-desktop-plugins: 1.0.2-0
* ros-indigo-rosh-geometry: 1.0.1-0
* ros-indigo-rosh-robot: 1.0.1-0
* ros-indigo-rosh-robot-plugins: 1.0.1-0
* ros-indigo-rosh-visualization: 1.0.2-0
* ros-indigo-roshlaunch: 1.0.5-0
* ros-indigo-serial-utils: 0.1.0-0
* ros-indigo-shadow-robot: 1.3.2-0
* ros-indigo-sr-description: 1.3.2-0
* ros-indigo-sr-example: 1.3.2-0
* ros-indigo-sr-gazebo-plugins: 1.3.2-0
* ros-indigo-sr-hand: 1.3.2-0
* ros-indigo-sr-hardware-interface: 1.3.2-0
* ros-indigo-sr-mechanism-controllers: 1.3.2-0
* ros-indigo-sr-mechanism-model: 1.3.2-0
* ros-indigo-sr-moveit-config: 1.3.2-0
* ros-indigo-sr-movements: 1.3.2-0
* ros-indigo-sr-robot-msgs: 1.3.2-0
* ros-indigo-sr-self-test: 1.3.2-0
* ros-indigo-sr-standalone: 1.3.2-0
* ros-indigo-sr-tactile-sensors: 1.3.2-0
* ros-indigo-sr-utilities: 1.3.2-0
* ros-indigo-statistics-msgs: 0.9.2-0
* ros-indigo-wfov-camera-msgs: 0.9.2-0
Updated Packages [94]:
* ros-indigo-arbotix: 0.9.2-0 -> 0.10.0-0
* ros-indigo-arbotix-controllers: 0.9.2-0 -> 0.10.0-0
* ros-indigo-arbotix-firmware: 0.9.2-0 -> 0.10.0-0
* ros-indigo-arbotix-msgs: 0.9.2-0 -> 0.10.0-0
* ros-indigo-arbotix-python: 0.9.2-0 -> 0.10.0-0
* ros-indigo-arbotix-sensors: 0.9.2-0 -> 0.10.0-0
* ros-indigo-compressed-depth-image-transport: 1.9.0-0 -> 1.9.1-0
* ros-indigo-compressed-image-transport: 1.9.0-0 -> 1.9.1-0
* ros-indigo-flir-ptu-description: 0.1.3-0 -> 0.1.4-0
* ros-indigo-flir-ptu-driver: 0.1.3-0 -> 0.1.4-0
* ros-indigo-flir-ptu-viz: 0.1.3-0 -> 0.1.4-0
* ros-indigo-gazebo-msgs: 2.4.3-1 -> 2.4.4-0
* ros-indigo-gazebo-plugins: 2.4.3-1 -> 2.4.4-0
* ros-indigo-gazebo-ros: 2.4.3-1 -> 2.4.4-0
* ros-indigo-gazebo-ros-pkgs: 2.4.3-1 -> 2.4.4-0
* ros-indigo-image-transport-plugins: 1.9.0-0 -> 1.9.1-0
* ros-indigo-mavlink: 1.0.9-5 -> 1.0.9-7
* ros-indigo-mavros: 0.5.0-0 -> 0.6.0-0
* ros-indigo-message-filters: 1.11.6-0 -> 1.11.7-0
* ros-indigo-mk: 1.11.2-0 -> 1.11.3-0
* ros-indigo-opencv-candidate: 0.2.1-0 -> 0.2.3-0
* ros-indigo-orocos-kdl: 1.2.2-2 -> 1.3.0-0
* ros-indigo-python-orocos-kdl: 1.2.2-2 -> 1.3.0-0
* ros-indigo-ros: 1.11.2-0 -> 1.11.3-0
* ros-indigo-ros-comm: 1.11.6-0 -> 1.11.7-0
* ros-indigo-ros-ethercat: 0.1.7-0 -> 0.1.8-0
* ros-indigo-ros-ethercat-eml: 0.1.7-0 -> 0.1.8-0
* ros-indigo-ros-ethercat-hardware: 0.1.7-0 -> 0.1.8-0
* ros-indigo-ros-ethercat-loop: 0.1.7-0 -> 0.1.8-0
* ros-indigo-ros-ethercat-model: 0.1.7-0 -> 0.1.8-0
* ros-indigo-rosbag: 1.11.6-0 -> 1.11.7-0
* ros-indigo-rosbag-storage: 1.11.6-0 -> 1.11.7-0
* ros-indigo-rosbash: 1.11.2-0 -> 1.11.3-0
* ros-indigo-rosboost-cfg: 1.11.2-0 -> 1.11.3-0
* ros-indigo-rosbuild: 1.11.2-0 -> 1.11.3-0
* ros-indigo-rosclean: 1.11.2-0 -> 1.11.3-0
* ros-indigo-rosconsole: 1.11.6-0 -> 1.11.7-0
* ros-indigo-rosconsole-bridge: 0.4.1-0 -> 0.4.2-0
* ros-indigo-roscpp: 1.11.6-0 -> 1.11.7-0
* ros-indigo-roscreate: 1.11.2-0 -> 1.11.3-0
* ros-indigo-rosgraph: 1.11.6-0 -> 1.11.7-0
* ros-indigo-roslang: 1.11.2-0 -> 1.11.3-0
* ros-indigo-roslaunch: 1.11.6-0 -> 1.11.7-0
* ros-indigo-roslib: 1.11.2-0 -> 1.11.3-0
* ros-indigo-roslz4: 1.11.6-0 -> 1.11.7-0
* ros-indigo-rosmake: 1.11.2-0 -> 1.11.3-0
* ros-indigo-rosmaster: 1.11.6-0 -> 1.11.7-0
* ros-indigo-rosmsg: 1.11.6-0 -> 1.11.7-0
* ros-indigo-rosnode: 1.11.6-0 -> 1.11.7-0
* ros-indigo-rosout: 1.11.6-0 -> 1.11.7-0
* ros-indigo-rosparam: 1.11.6-0 -> 1.11.7-0
* ros-indigo-rospy: 1.11.6-0 -> 1.11.7-0
* ros-indigo-rosservice: 1.11.6-0 -> 1.11.7-0
* ros-indigo-rostest: 1.11.6-0 -> 1.11.7-0
* ros-indigo-rostopic: 1.11.6-0 -> 1.11.7-0
* ros-indigo-rosunit: 1.11.2-0 -> 1.11.3-0
* ros-indigo-roswtf: 1.11.6-0 -> 1.11.7-0
* ros-indigo-rqt-action: 0.3.7-0 -> 0.3.8-0
* ros-indigo-rqt-bag: 0.3.7-0 -> 0.3.8-0
* ros-indigo-rqt-bag-plugins: 0.3.7-0 -> 0.3.8-0
* ros-indigo-rqt-common-plugins: 0.3.7-0 -> 0.3.8-0
* ros-indigo-rqt-console: 0.3.7-0 -> 0.3.8-0
* ros-indigo-rqt-dep: 0.3.7-0 -> 0.3.8-0
* ros-indigo-rqt-ez-publisher: 0.0.5-0 -> 0.2.0-0
* ros-indigo-rqt-graph: 0.3.7-0 -> 0.3.8-0
* ros-indigo-rqt-image-view: 0.3.7-0 -> 0.3.8-0
* ros-indigo-rqt-launch: 0.3.7-0 -> 0.3.8-0
* ros-indigo-rqt-logger-level: 0.3.7-0 -> 0.3.8-0
* ros-indigo-rqt-msg: 0.3.7-0 -> 0.3.8-0
* ros-indigo-rqt-plot: 0.3.7-0 -> 0.3.8-0
* ros-indigo-rqt-publisher: 0.3.7-0 -> 0.3.8-0
* ros-indigo-rqt-py-common: 0.3.7-0 -> 0.3.8-0
* ros-indigo-rqt-py-console: 0.3.7-0 -> 0.3.8-0
* ros-indigo-rqt-reconfigure: 0.3.7-0 -> 0.3.8-0
* ros-indigo-rqt-service-caller: 0.3.7-0 -> 0.3.8-0
* ros-indigo-rqt-shell: 0.3.7-0 -> 0.3.8-0
* ros-indigo-rqt-srv: 0.3.7-0 -> 0.3.8-0
* ros-indigo-rqt-top: 0.3.7-0 -> 0.3.8-0
* ros-indigo-rqt-topic: 0.3.7-0 -> 0.3.8-0
* ros-indigo-rqt-web: 0.3.7-0 -> 0.3.8-0
* ros-indigo-sr-ronex: 0.9.14-0 -> 0.9.15-0
* ros-indigo-sr-ronex-controllers: 0.9.14-0 -> 0.9.15-0
* ros-indigo-sr-ronex-drivers: 0.9.14-0 -> 0.9.15-0
* ros-indigo-sr-ronex-examples: 0.9.14-0 -> 0.9.15-0
* ros-indigo-sr-ronex-external-protocol: 0.9.14-0 -> 0.9.15-0
* ros-indigo-sr-ronex-hardware-interface: 0.9.14-0 -> 0.9.15-0
* ros-indigo-sr-ronex-launch: 0.9.14-0 -> 0.9.15-0
* ros-indigo-sr-ronex-msgs: 0.9.14-0 -> 0.9.15-0
* ros-indigo-sr-ronex-test: 0.9.14-0 -> 0.9.15-0
* ros-indigo-sr-ronex-transmissions: 0.9.14-0 -> 0.9.15-0
* ros-indigo-sr-ronex-utilities: 0.9.14-0 -> 0.9.15-0
* ros-indigo-theora-image-transport: 1.9.0-0 -> 1.9.1-0
* ros-indigo-topic-tools: 1.11.6-0 -> 1.11.7-0
* ros-indigo-xmlrpcpp: 1.11.6-0 -> 1.11.7-0
Removed Packages [0]:
Thanks to all ROS maintainers who make packages available to the ROS community. The above list of packages was made possible by the work of the following maintainers:
* Aaron Blasdel
* Ben Charrow
* Dan Lazewatsky
* David Gossow
* Dirk Thomas
* Dorian Scholz
* Isaac Isao Saito
* Isaac Saito
* John Hsu
* Jonathan Bohren
* Julius Kammerl
* Maintained by Dan Lazewatsky
* Manos Nikolaidis
* Michael Ferguson
* Mike Purvis
* MoveIt Setup Assistant
* Orocos Developers
* Ruben Smits
* Scott K Logan
* Sebastian Kasperski
* Shadow Robot's software team
* Takashi Ogura
* Vincent Rabaud
* Vladimir Ermakov
* William Woodall
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From Kel Guerin at Johns Hopkins University
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At the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics at Johns Hopkins University, we have utilized the extensive visualization tools available in ROS to create an immersive virtual reality environment for interacting with robots. The versatile plug-in system for the RVIZ visualization package has allowed us to create virtual user interfaces, information displays, and interactive objects that co-exist with other resources in the RVIZ environment. Additionally, the excellent Oculus Rift RVIZ plugin gave us the perfect starting point for using RVIZ as a VR environment. This provides us an excellent test-bed for virtually teleoperating an teleprogramming our robots. Finally, the flexibility of ROS lets us deploy IVRE on several robots in our lab, including industrial systems and surgical robots. For more information on the tools we used, checkout the oculus rviz plugin and the RVIZ plugin API.
The Shadow Robot Company is excited to announce the next module in the RoNeX range - the RoNeX SPI Module!
This Module allows the connection of multiple SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface) devices to ROS. It provides 4 discrete SPI ports, plus 6 Analogue inputs and 6 General Purpose Digital I/O lines. The Digital I/O can be used as additional SPI chip select lines, allowing the module to interface with up to 10 SPI devices in total.
RoNeX makes data from these SPI devices directly accessible via ROS topics, and of course a single RoNeX stack can comprise a mix of GIO Modules and SPI Modules that best suits your project.
The RoNeX ROS wiki page can be found here and source here. More details on RoNeX here.
RoNeX allows ROS users to prototype and build ROS robots quickly and easily, providing a seamless link between ROS and a variety of sensors and actuators.
"At Shadow we use ROS in almost every project, so ROS Hydro drivers were our first priority" said Ugo Cupcic, Head of Software at Shadow. "We have been using RoNeX internally for prototyping new robots and our engineers all needed great ROS support, so that really set a high bar for the software team to meet!"
Devices connected via RoNeX can be directly accessed via ROS topics. Custom transmissions have also been implemented for ROS Hydro, so it's incredibly simple to control joint based robots just by adding a few extra lines to a URDF description.
ROS Hydro drivers are available now from your standard ROS repositories for the RoNeX General Input/Output Module. Shadow expects to announce an SPI Module very soon, with ROS Hydro drivers to follow shortly afterwards.
The RoNeX ROS wiki page can be found here and source here. More details on RoNeX here.
With the imminent release of ROS Hydromedusa, we are happy to continue the tradition of releasing great artwork to accompany great software.
This time we're trying something new: to make ROS Hydromedusa T-shirts available to everyone, we're running a campaign on TeeSpring. This is a limited time offer; by pooling resources and ordering shirts at the same time, we can keep costs down for everyone.
Please show your support of ROS by ordering a shirt! Proceeds from shirt sales will primarily cover the cost of the logo design, with any excess to be used for future ROS maintenance and development.
It's a 3-week campaign, with 2 weeks and 6 days left. We need at least 150 shirt orders by the end of the campaign to make the purchase. Orders in the US should arrive within 2 weeks of the end of the campaign; allow an extra week for international orders.
There are a variety of men's and women's sizes and TeeSpring supports international shipping.
Cross posted from osrfoundation.org
We're happy to announce that we've posted videos of the ROSCon 2013 talks, along with speakers' slides. They're linked from the program page. Clear your calendar; that's over 16 hours of ROSCon content.
Slides and/or video are missing for a few of the talks. They'll trickle in over time. We're also expecting to get photos from the official photographer soon. In the meantime, attendee photos are coming together on G+.
The final registration count was 288, up 37% from 2012. Thanks again to everybody for coming! And thanks to our sponsors, without whom we couldn't put on such an event.
We're pleased to announce that the ROS project will soon be hosted by Oregon State University's Open Source Lab (OSL) (http://osuosl.org/). The OSL provides services to many open source communities. We are pleased to join the ranks of projects like Drupal and kernel.org. We'd like to thank Willow Garage for providing hosting and infrastructure for the entire ROS community for over 5 years.
We'd also like to thank Lance Albertson, Carlos Jensen, and Bill Smart for welcoming us to the OSL. We look forward to working with Oregon State and the OSL to provide ongoing hosting as well as exploring ways to improve ROS infrastructure for the greater community.
In the coming weeks, we'll migrate the wiki, ROS Answers, and the Ubuntu package repository from Willow Garage to the OSL. We'll announce more detailed plans as they come together and we'll do our best to minimize disruptions during the migration.
As you might imagine, hosting for these critical services, which are heavily used around the world and around the clock, costs money. We need your help! A big thank you to the ROS-Industrial Consortium, which has stepped up to support part of this cost. If your organization can financially support ROS project hosting, please contact us at info@osrfoundation.org.
All,
ROS-Industrial (http://rosindustrial.org/ ) is an exciting new program to leverage ROS for industrial automation and robotics. The program is a result of my work as a visiting researcher at Willow Garage last year. What started as a simple project has grown into a community driven effort over the past year (much like ROS but not as big, yet). With the goal of growing the ROS-Industrial community and increasing the support for industrial robot platforms, I would like to solicit your help. We have two needs, basic driver development and advanced driver development.
Basic Driver Development (http://ros.org/wiki/
Over the past year we have worked to create basic drivers for the major industrial robot vendors. We are well on our way with current support for ABB, Adept, Fanuc, Motoman, and Universal. We are currently in need of developers for Kuka, Comau, and Kawasaki robots. We have developed tools and libraries to facilitate development, so the amount of driver development can be minimal.
Advanced Driver Development(http://ros.org/
The goal of advanced driver development is to add functions and capabilities to the basic drivers that would be needed to deploy a real-life robot work cell. We have brainstormed some of these requirements (see link above), but would like to get community input as well. We'd also like community help in adding these capabilities to the existing drivers for all supported robot vendors.
If you have an interest in helping, please contact me(or reply to this email). Thank you for your consideration,
Shaun
ROS Groovy Galapagos will be the sixth ROS distribution release and was released December 31st 2012. In this release we have focused on the core infrastructure of ROS to make it easier to use, more modular, more scalable, work across a larger number of operating systems/hardware architectures/robots and most importantly to further involve the ROS community.
Contents
ROS Groovy Galapagos will be primarily targeted at the Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise) release, though compatibility with other Linux systems as well as Mac OS X, Android, and Windows is anticipated. For more information on compatibility, please see REP 3: Target Platforms.
Please see the installation instructions. There are binary packages available for Ubuntu distributions, Oneiric, Precise, and Quantal for both 32 and 64 bit architectures. There is also improved infrastructure for building from source, most heavily tested on OSX. And experimental instructions for other platforms.
Ubuntu Users: Please make sure to use the Python tools from apt and not pip. The pip based installs tend to go out of date and not get updated with the rest of the system.
Traditionally, ROS code has been scattered across numerous version control systems (git, svn, hg, etc) across different hosting services throughout the world. Though the ROS wiki has acted as a central point of documentation, issue/ticket tracking has been just as disparate as the usage of VCS tools.
With ROS Groovy, an effort has been made to move core packages to GitHub along with all issue tracking. This has brought several benefits including making ROS more available to the wider open source community and providing VCS consistency for ROS packages. Most importantly, utilizing GitHub has involved the ROS community more and given it more ownership of the codebase. GitHub's pull requests have made it much easier for the core ROS development team to apply patches from the community as well as respond to design feedback more rapidly. In the last development cycle there have been 71 people who have contributed to the rosdistro file, using 239 pull requests and there exist 115 public forks of the rosdistro project on GitHub. The ease of forking and submitting pull requests has made this higher level of community engagement possible. GitHub additionally provides excellent tools for navigating code, managing issues/milestones, and increasing developer communication. All ROS package developers are highly encouraged, but not required, to utilize GitHub for their own repositories so as to further unify both the ROS codebase and community.
On GitHub, ROS repositories are spread across several GitHub "organizations" to group related repositories in an intuitive manner:
ROS Infrastructure - Foundational tools for ROS ecosystem such as package release (bloom), build farm scripts, documentation generators. Most of these are backend, non-user facing repositories.
ROS Core - Core ROS libraries and tools such as standard messages, the build system catkin, the ROS clientsroscpp and rospy, actionlib, pluginlib, nodelet, etc
ROS Visualization - Graphical tools to visualize data including rviz and rqt.
ROS Perception - Tools for perception and vision
ROS Drivers - Drivers for sensors and other hardware
ROS Planning - Navigation and path planning related packages including navigation and moveit
The most striking and significant change in Groovy is the introduction of a new build system called catkin which will eventually fully replace the original rosbuild build system. catkin was developed to address several drawbacks inrosbuild so that ROS can continue to grow and scale. As opposed to rosbuild catkin promotes Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) compliance, making it much easier to distribute ROS packages on other operating systems and architectures.
Though a prototype version was already introduced in fuerte for a only few packages, catkin is now the official build system of ROS. rosbuild will continue to be supported for the forseeable future, but in time will be deprecated. catkin has been designed to be backwards compatible with existing rosbuild packages and stacks that have not yet migrated. Most of the core packages have already been migrated and new packages should utilize catkin.
The workflow of catkin is somewhat different from rosbuild, but great care has been taken to make the transition as smooth as possible. Here are some resources for getting started with catkin:
catkin - Main wiki page
catkin/conceptual_overview - Reasoning behind the move from rosbuild to catkin
catkin/Tutorials - Tutorials
catkin/migrating_from_rosbuild - Migrating from rosbuild to catkin
With the new version of catkin in Groovy, the concept of Stacks has been removed. One of the main reasons for this was that there was a duplication of dependency tracking between packages and stacks. Previously packages only depend on packages, and stacks only depend on stacks, so the stack which contains a package must depend on all of the stacks which contain the dependencies of that package. Additionally, by removing stacks the code base has become more modular because you can install any package and its dependencies, where as in the past a package would often unnecessarily pull in its stack and other unused dependencies.
To preserve some of the benefits of stack, the concept of "metapackages" replaces the concept of stacks. A metapackage is not a container of packages like rosbuild stacks were, but a named set of references to packages. It can be used to preserve some structure using a catkin metapackage replacing an old rosbuild stacks (this helps with for backwards compatibility of documentation with rosbuild, e.g. in wikis). A metapackage can depend on packages which don't necessarily reside in the same folder or source repository. This allows for more flexibility of development workflows, allowing to have separate repositories for packages that belonged to a single stack.
This is captured more formally in REP 127
With catkin also comes a new package release system known as bloom. bloom not only simplifies your workflow when releasing ROS packages to the world, but also provides features to make it easier to maintain released packages, version them, and patch/backport changes.
bloom takes your catkin packages and releases them to a "release repository". All of the ROS release repositories are hosted in the ros-gbp organization on https://github.com: https://github.com/ros-gbp. The release repository contains snapshots of your source repository (the repository you develop on) and provides tags to the snapshots. Additionally it creates a "release" branch for each package in your upstream repository on which you can make patches and it provides tags for each released version of your packages. Finally, bloom can generate files for building Debian .debs on the ROS build farm. Because we host our release repositories on https://github.com, there are known urls for each release of each package. This makes the release repositories a good source for building released ros packages from source.
bloom allows a source code repository to contain any number of packages, related or not. The only caveat to having multiple packages in a single repository is that they must be released with a common version number, i.e. one release version number per repository.
In Groovy, core ROS GUI tools (rxconsole, rxgraph, etc) have been significantly refined. These tools have been replaced by a single new tool called rqt. rqt is a software framework that implements the various GUI tools in the form of plugins. One can run all the existing GUI tools as dockable windows within rqt -- even rviz! The tools can still run in a traditional standalone method, but rqt makes it easier to manage all the various windows on the screen at one moment.
Users can create their own plugins for rqt with either Python or C++. Over 20 plugins have already been created and more are slated for development.
rviz has been significantly redesigned with a cleaner user interface and and a new plugin API covering all major functions. RViz is now "on its own" and so can be installed directly (on Ubuntu for example) as ros-groovy-rviz. It no longer depends on visualization_common, instead depends directly on standard OS installations of OGRE, easing compilation from source. Python support has been greatly expanded, so rviz windows, displays, viewpoints, and tools can all be manipulated from Python now.
The "save" file format has also changed: it now saves into "*.rviz" files which are in YAML format, easing manual editing, comparison, and automatic generation.
pluginlib, the library for creating plugins in C++ code, has been almost completely rewritten while retaining 100% backwards compatibility. New features include thread-safety, simplified API, and true library class introspection. pluginlibis now built on top of a new ROS-independent package called class_loader which can be used to work with plugins in software that does not utilize the ROS build system.
The Gazebo simulator project, the simulation engine used within the simulator_gazebo ros stack, has recently undergone major improvements and re-factoring as it went from version 1.0 to 1.3. The Groovy release of Gazebo has been updated to run with gazebo 1.2.x with pending updates to upgrade to gazebo 1.3.x in the near future.
All changes in the underlying simulator can be found on gazebosim.org, as well as commonly asked questions and answers for gazebo via gazebo answers page.
Other New Packages:
depthimage_to_laserscanreplaces pointcloud_to_laserscan
The significant overhaul of core ROS infrastructure has meant a significant change in fundamental ROS documentation, primarily in the tutorials. It is recommended to review them again, even if you are a ROS veteran, at http://www.ros.org/wiki/ROS/Tutorials. All the Tutorials beyond Creating A Package have been converted to support the new and old build system.
One of the valuable services provided to the ROS community is the public indexing of packages and automatic documentation generation onto ros.org. The entire system has been overhauled to parallelize and isolate failures of individual repositories from stopping other repositories from being documented. The new infrastructure now also provides properly versioned documentation for each ROS distro. For more information on how to be indexed in the new system see the Get Involved page.
As with any release there have been some areas which will require updating. In this cycle most of the changes have been adding APIs while maintaining backwards compatibility for the old APIs.
The biggest change is the switch from rosbuild to catkin. This switch has been done while providing backwards compatibility, such that legacy packages can depend on converted packages without being changed. However catkin based packages cannot depend on rosbuild based packages. This leads to what has been called the rising tide where the conversion to catkin must propogate up the dependency tree. Wet packages, catkin based, are always below the dry packages, rosbuild based, as the tide rises.
A detailed guide to converting packages can be found in the catkin documentation. catkin/migrating_from_rosbuild
One significant change is the transition from Wx to Qt. If you have been using Wx graphical toolkits it is recommended to switch. Most of our primary visualization tools have been ported to Qt. And there are many plugins for them. There are tutorials on the [[rqt] page on how to write new Qt based plugins.
If you have been using the laser_drivers the changes made by REP 117 have now become the default option. For more information see REP 117
The planning for the Groovy release was coordinated on the planning page.
A significant amount of the Groovy development was coordinated by Special Interest Groups. These groups are summarized at the bottom of the planning page.
Four REPs have been finalized during the Groovy development cycle:
Hi Everyone,
We're pleased to announce ROS Groovy Beta 2 has been released.
Since Beta 1 there have been over 150 packages released including approximately 40 new packages. Bringing our total to over 380 packages building into debian releases on both oneiric and precise.
Please give it a try and give your feedback. On ubuntu if you installed Beta 1 from debian packages you can just "sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade" to get the new release.
We have a new build status page available at http://www.ros.org/debbuild/groovy.html Please be patient, it's a lot of data to download at once but it gives a good sense of what the status of the builds are.
ROS turned five years old in November, so it's time for our sort-of-annual State of ROS. If you recall, we took a deep dive into the growth of ROS in our third-year anniversarypost. We won't be as prolific this time around, but suffice it to say that the past two years have built on the excitement, growth, and adoption of ROS.
Numbers don't tell the entire story, but it's a good place to start.
· There are 175 organizations or individuals who have publicly release ROS software in our indexed repositories, up from 50 in 2009 (through October)
· Not counting the approximately 40 PR2s all over the world, there are many hundreds of robots running ROS. We are aware of more than 90 types of robots that are running ROS, up from 50. With 28 robots with supported installation instructions.
· We had 3699 public ROS packages as of April, compared to 1600 three years ago
· ROS continues to have a strong impact in the worldwide academic community, with 439 citations on Google Scholar for the paper: ROS: an open-source Robot Operating System
· There are now people working on ROS on every continent. Africa, South America, and Antarctica are new to the community this time around. Yes, Antarctica.
· You can now buy a book on ROS.
· One, and counting. This is the number of industry conferences dedicated to ROS. More than 200 individuals attended the ROSCon 2012 debut last year in St. Paul, MN. ROSCon 2013 heads to Stuttgart, Germany next year.
· People often ask how many users are there of ROS. Due to the open source nature of ROS, we simply don't know how many ROS users there are in the world. What we can tell you is that the ros.org wiki has had over 55,000 unique visitors in the last month. This doesn't include traffic to our many worldwide mirrors.
The latest version of ROS, Groovy Galapagos, is currently in Beta 1 Release. Groovy will be the sixth full release of ROS. This release is laying the foundations for enabling ROS to continue to grow the number of platforms supported.
Inspired by The Mozilla Foundation, The Apache Software Foundation, and The GNOME Foundation, our three-year anniversary blog post discussed the possibility of a ROS Foundation. In May of this year, Willow Garage announced the debut of the Open Source Robotics Foundation, Inc. OSRF is an independent non-profit organization founded by members of the global robotics community whose mission is to support the development, distribution, and adoption of open source software for use in robotics research, education, and product development.
Because of the BSD license for ROS, we often have no idea who is using ROS in their commercial deployments. We suspect there are a few we are missing, but two major new products were announced this year that are built using ROS. First is Baxter from Rethink Robotics. Baxter was announced just a few months ago and the company has set their sites on manufacturing industries. Check out IEEE Spectrum's article on Rethink here. Also built on ROS is Toyota's Human Support Robot (HSR), which is designed to help those with limited mobility within the home. ROS has even made inroads within the industrial robot world of late, specifically through the ROS-Industrial Consortium.
We can't discuss commercial deployments of ROS without mentioning TurtleBot, originally released in April 2011. Recognizing that not everyone can afford, or even needs, a $280,000 PR2 robot, TurtleBot was brought to market for the express purpose of letting as many people as possible get their hands on ROS. TurtleBot 2.0 was recently featured on Engadget and is now available for pre-order at www.turtlebot.com
At Willow Garage, we often refer to ourselves as a software company disguised as a robot company, and we can point to the ongoing growth of ROS as proof of that assertion. We have also been stating for some time that we need a LAMP stack for robotics. With the latest developments in commercial robots built on ROS, it feels like we are in the beginning stages of that process. We can't predict what ROS will look like in five year, or twenty-five, but if we continue to see the adoption, innovation, and excitement from the ROS community that we have seen in the first five years, then things are certainly looking Rosey.
Hi Everyone,
We are pleased to announce the ROS Groovy Galapagos Beta 1 Release is available for download!
In this release we have focused on core infrastructure. The core build tools prototyped in Fuerte have been significantly refined. We have upgrade the continuous integration and documentation infrastructure to be more modular and enable scaling better.
One of the core upgrades has been the buildsystem catkin, which is based on CMake. It has been designed to provide the core usability of the rosbuild ecosystem but converge to more standard software engineering practices. For more information on catkin please see the catkin wiki page and the associated tutorials](http://www.ros.org/wiki/catkin/Tutorials)
There has also been a significant overhaul of the core tutorials. It is recommended to review and reference back to them: http://www.ros.org/wiki/ROS/Tutorials all the Tutorials beyond Creating A Package have been converted to support the new and old build system.
For instructions installing please visit the Groovy installation page. There are currently well over 300 packages building successful on all three supported Ubuntu distros (Oneiric, Precise, Quantal) with over 200 of them being built using catkin. This constitutes over 75% of the released packages from Fuerte. During the beta is a great time for maintainers of the stacks which are not currently building to release their stacks for Groovy. The status of the builds can be found on the debbuild status page
There have been many other upgrades in the groovy development process. One of the larger upgrades involved changing the recommended gui framework from Wx to Qt. There is a new rqt_gui which can embed Python and C++ plugins. Rviz has been ported and has a new plugin API. Almost all the core Wx based visualization tools have been switched to have Qt equivalents, and those that have not switched yet are expected to be ported very soon.
Three REPs have been released during the Groovy development cycle:
REP 127 Specification of package manifest format
REP 128 Naming Conventions for Catkin Based Workspaces
REP 131 ROS Groovy Variants
Ubuntu Users: Please make sure to use the Python tools from apt and not pip. The pip based installs tend to go out of date and not get updated with the rest of the system.
Note: For the beta we have disabled 32 bit binaries to decrease the load on the build farm. They will be re-enabled during the beta testing cycle before the full release.
Call for Proposals: ROSCon 2013
Stuttgart, Germany
11-12 May 2013
(immediately following ICRA)
Details: http://roscon.ros.org/
Proposals: submit@roscon.ros.org
Questions: info@roscon.ros.org
ROSCon 2013 is a chance for ROS developers of all levels, beginner to expert, to spend an extraordinary weekend learning from and networking with the ROS community. Get tips and tricks from experts, network, and share ideas with fellow developers from around the globe.
ROSCon is a developers' conference, in the model of PyCon and BoostCon. Following the success of the inaugural ROSCon in St. Paul, Minnesota http://roscon.ros.org/2012 ) this year's ROSCon will be held in Stuttgart, Germany. Similar to last year, the two-day program will com prise technical talks and tutorials that will introduce you to new tools and libraries, as well as teach you more about the ones you already know. The bulk of the program will be 30-40 minute pre sen tations (some may be longer or shorter).
Want to present at ROSCon? Submit a proposal! For details on proposing, go to http://roscon.ros.org/
If you don't want to make a formal presentation, you should still bring your new project or idea to ROSCon!
There will be several sessions of Lightning Talks, which are 5-minute mini-talks that are scheduled just-in-time at the conference. There will also be open space for Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) meetings, impromptu hacking sessions, and informal presentations.
On behalf of the ROSCon 2013 Organizing Committee:
Alexander Bubeck, Fraunhofer IPA
Tully Foote, Willow Garage
Ryan Gariepy, Clearpath Robotics
Brian Gerkey, Open Source Robotics Foundation
Florian Weisshardt, Fraunhofer IPA
Matthew Williamson, Rethink Robotics
From the ROS Industrial Consortium
With input from the industrial robotics and automation community, Southwest Research Institute has set a low-cost membership model for the ROS-Industrial Consortium (RIC). This model encourages a broad base of membership and gives participants more control over how development funds are used. In conjunction with the launch of the consortium, SwRI has funded a special internal research program to accelerate ROS-Industrial development and benefit the technical needs of the Consortium.
Southwest Research Institute is launching the ROS-Industrial Consortium to conduct foundational, precompetitive research and code development and apply advanced ROS software to industrial applications. "As an early adapter of ROS, SwRI has been successfully leveraging it for industrial robotics applications," explained Shaun Edwards, a senior research engineer in SwRI's Automation and Data Systems Division. ROS (Robot Operating System) is an open-source project providing a common framework of libraries and tools for a wide range of applications, particularly in service and research robotics. In January, SwRI established the ROS-Industrial repository, an open-source resource providing a common industrial control platform to facilitate technology transfer from research labs to industry.
"Following other successful open-source projects as models, SwRI is initiating a precompetitive commercial collaborative research consortium, exclusively focused on the needs of industrial robot users," said Paul Evans, director of SwRI's Manufacturing Systems Department. RIC full membership is set at $10,000, with lesser levels of membership available (see membership table). "RIC will accelerate the development of ROS-Industrial. RIC members will work together to develop an application roadmap for ROS-Industrial, set near-term technical goals and participate in spinoff focused technical projects."
"We are excited about a multi-year, internal research program SwRI funded to capitalize on recent research and allow us to accelerate hardware integration tasks," Edwards continued. "The funding allows us to implement ROS-I interfaces for industrial robots to enable users to reuse software for advanced robotics applications. The program will also fund a significant effort to develop advanced functionality and add new capabilities to highly reliable industrial robot platforms."
To date, ROS-Industrial has demonstrated capabilities unmatched using conventional industrial robot control for applications such as material handling in dynamic environments with on-the-fly object segmentation and grasp planning http://youtu.be/_WG-45cZSUQ. Standard interfaces allow high-level software to work with any robot. ROS-Industrial supports robotic workcell visualization and simulation capabilities such as RViz, allowing system development and testing with or without physical hardware.
ROS-Industrial allows advanced 2D-vision and 3D-point cloud sensor processing. Rich software development tools (based on standard Linux tools) include universal logging, debuggers and automated coding. Multiple robot path planners and optimizations allow developers to choose and customize systems that support high-degree-of-freedom systems coordinating multiple arms.
"It's an exciting time in industrial robotics," continued Edwards. "After the economic downturn, the U.S. is now seeing a new government focus on manufacturing, a surge of venture capital spending in this area, and a trend toward returning manufacturing to the U.S. due to rising labor costs in other countries."
For more information about the ROS-Industrial Consortium, see http://rosindustrial.org/ric/default-ric.htm or contact Evans at paul.evans@swri.org or (210) 522-2994.
Crosspost from willowgarage.com
Clearpath Robotics aims to progress robotics development by providing universities with robust platforms for prototyping and research. To give robotics research an extra boost, Clearpath Robotics introduced the PartnerBot Grant Program this summer.
The PartnerBot Grant Program is a one-year commitment during which a prestigious research team will use the Clearpath Robotics Husky A200 to pursue its research goal, publish for public review, and add code to the rapidly growing open source ROS (Robot Operating System) community. Initially aimed at donating $25,000 worth of equipment, the sheer number of applicants and outstanding quality of the submissions prompted Clearpath Robotics to increase the total value to $100,000.
The Husky A200 is a rugged, all-terrain robotic platform for rapid prototyping and research applications. In the past we've seen it used for prototyping planetary rovers, researching autonomous navigation, environment mapping, and countless other applications. The Husky A200 integrates seamlessly with the free and open source ROS robotics framework that offers full control of the Husky, including (but definitely not limited to) autonomous navigation, perception, and mapping. Using the standardized platform and open software allows researchers to cooperate, share findings, and repeat experiments.
More than 150 universities world wide showed interest in the PartnerBot Grant Program. Clearpath Robotics has received submissions from every continent on the planet (except from Antarctica) with applications ranging from mine clearing, to agricultural robots, to planetary rovers, and everything in between. With such a great turnout and impressive applications it seemed a shame to support only one research project, so Clearpath Robotics has worked feverishly over the past month to scrape together enough money to support the following 10 distinguished research teams.
Clearpath Robotics would like to thank everyone who invested time and energy to submit a proposal. The judging process was tough, selecting only one would have been impossible - even 10 was difficult. To read more about the outstanding research projects and PartnerBot recipients, visit the PartnerBot site.
There's exciting news out of Boston today with the launch of Rethink Robotics's new robot. Rethink Robotics is developing a family of low cost and highly intelligent robots that can perform simple tasks in a manufacturing environment, increasing the productivity of the people around them. Rethink Robotics was founded by Rodney Brooks, former Director of the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and co-Founder of iRobot Corporation.
Rethink's robots can be taken out of the box, taught a task by anyone, and start work in a few hours, eliminating the need for systems integration. They are safe to interact with people at close range and are easy to train and retrain on the fly. They are nothing like any existing industrial robots.
While all of this is very exciting for the robotics industry, and certainly for our friends at Rethink, what we personally find most exciting is the role played by ROS in today's news. Rethink's new Baxter robot is, in the words of CEO Scott Eckert, "built upon ROS." We had some hint from Rethink's (then Heartland's) support of ROSCon 2012 that they were doing something with ROS, but we were very pleasantly surprised today to hear that ROS is such a central part of Baxter.
As ROS edges closer to its five-year anniversary, this is a great milestone for the ROS community. Rethink is actively hiring for a Senior Developer Relations Engineer with expertise in ROS, and expects that individual to play an important role as part of the ROS community.
Congratulations to everyone at Rethink Robotics, and we are looking forward to their contribution to the ROS community.
ROS Fuerte is now officially available!
With each ROS distribution, we've focused on making great robotics libraries work together easily, and with this release we've made many changes under the hood to make it simpler and cleaner for you to integrate your software into the ROS ecosystem.
ROS Fuerte includes major new releases of Gazebo 1.0 and PCL 1.5, and the core ROS libraries have been rewritten to be standalone: you can now easily use ROS messages in non-ROS frameworks. These standalone messages are made possible by a brand new, CMake-based build system and release toolchain that also greatly improve cross-platform and cross-compilation support. Cross-platform support has also been improved by an RViz port to Qt.
ROS aims to make robotics code more reusable, and this release is a strong new foundation for the next generation of great robotics libraries.
Please see the ROS Fuerte page for more information on what's new in Fuerte, how to migrate from Electric, and how to download the release.
ROS Fuerte Release Candidate 3 is now available. This update contains bug fixes to rospack and roscore.
Ubuntu users: If you have a previous install of ROS Fuerte Beta, please use "sudo apt-get update; sudo-apt-get upgrade" to make sure that all packages are properly updated.
Non-Ubuntu users: Installation instructions for the experimental platforms like OS X and Arch are still in progress, so we encourage users of those platforms to help test and contribute.
ROS Fuerte Release Candidate 2 is now available. This in a minor update that includes new versions of RViz and Gazebo.
Ubuntu users: If you have a previous install of ROS Fuerte Beta, please use "sudo apt-get update; sudo-apt-get upgrade" to make sure that all packages are properly updated.
Non-Ubuntu users: Installation instructions for the experimental platforms like OS X and Arch are still in progress, so we encourage users of those platforms to help test and contribute.
Willow Garage has announced the Open Source Robotics Foundation, which will sponsor the development of ROS and Gazebo and aims to generally "support the development, distribution, and adoption of open source software for use in robotics research, education, and product development."
From the announcement:
The mission of the OSR Foundation is "to support the development, distribution, and adoption of open source software for use in robotics research, education, and product development." You will find this mission on the new OSR Foundation Web site, but not much else. In the coming weeks, we will be expanding on our goals, our short- and long-term plans, and the individuals and organizations that will be leading the OSR Foundation. For now, contact OSRFÂ for more information or to get involved.
The first initiative of the OSRF will be participation in the DARPA Robotics Challenge, announced recently. The DARPA Robotics Challenge, or DRC, will launch in October 2012 and offers a $2 million prize "to whomever can help push the state-of-the-art in robotics beyond today's capabilities in support of the DoD's disaster recovery mission." The full announcement of the initiative specifically mentions the Fukushima nuclear accident as a recent example of a potential robotic application although other recent disasters such Hurricane Katrina and the oil spill at Deepwater Horizon also quickly come to mind.
DARPA today sponsored a Proposer's Day Workshop where more information about the Robotics Challenge is available via Webcast. During the Webcast, Nate Koenig from Willow Garage gave a brief talk on the current and future state of the open source Gazebo robot simulator, which will be extended by the OSR Foundation to support the DARPA Robot Challenge.
The DARPA Robotics Challenge supports the National Robotics Initiative announced by the Obama Administration in June 2011.
ROS Fuerte Release Candidate 1 is now available. Thanks to all who have filed bug reports and provided patches to fix issues during the ROS Fuerte Beta process. Barring any last-minute issues, this release candidate will be the official ROS Fuerte release, so we encourage all users to try this release out.
Ubuntu users: If you have a previous install of ROS Fuerte Beta, please use "sudo apt-get update; sudo-apt-get upgrade" to make sure that all packages are properly updated.
Non-Ubuntu users: Installation instructions for the experimental platforms like OS X and Arch are still in progress, so we encourage users of those platforms to help test and contribute.
ROS Fuerte Beta 2 is now available. Many thanks to all who have contributed bug reports. A special thanks to following individuals, who have improved Fuerte compatibility on non-Ubuntu platforms:
Installation instructions for ROS Fuerte Beta 2
Ubuntu Fuerte Beta 1 Users: in order to update to Beta 2, please run:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
(or uninstall Beta 1 first)
ROS Fuerte Beta 1 is now available. ROS Fuerte provides a new build system foundation for ROS, with low-level ROS libraries, including ROS messages, now much more accessible to non-ROS frameworks. Installation instructions for both apt-based (Ubuntu) and source installation are available on the ROS wiki. We appreciate your assistance in improving installation instructions for non-Ubuntu platforms.
A migration guide is available that covers ROS Fuerte changes, including migration from deprecated features that were removed in this release. ROS Fuerte features major changes to the build system that are mostly backwards compatible, but will eventually require more significant migration in future releases like ROS Groovy Galapagos. Tools like rosdep and roslaunch have more significant changes.
Please report any issues on the relevant bug trackers, which are usually linked from the bottom of wiki pages for a particular library/stack/package/tool.
More technical descriptions of the changes in ROS Fuerte Beta 1 are available here:
Announcement from Tully Foote (rosinstall maintainer) to ros-users
Hi Everyone,
Thanks to the work of Thibault Kruse we have released an upgraded version of rosinstall we have bumped it up to the 0.6 series to indicate the significant overhaul. The basic command line usage has not changed.
The following changes have been incorporated:
If you find problems please submit them at: https://kforge.ros.org/vcstools/trac/newticket
Tully
Announcement from simulator_gazebo maintainer John Hsu to ros-users
Hi All,
The new simulator_gazebo 1.6 release and the pr2_simulator 1.8 release shipped with ROS Fuerte, are based on the Gazebo 1.0.0 release candidate which is now considered API stable.
On the Gazebo side, major changes from Electric simulator_gazebo (pre gazebo-1.0.0-RC) to the Fuerte version (gazebo-1.0.0-RCX) can be found on the Gazebo change list wiki page. Notably, the new Gazebo plugins have been redesigned to be more flexible to the end-users, but unfortunately, this means the new plugin API is not backwards compatible with the old version. To convert old style plugins to the 1.0.0-RC plugin, please take a quick look at the plugin tutorials, in particular, this tutorial tries to provide an overview on the conversion process. For additional reference, you can also take a look at the updates in gazebo_plugins and pr2_gazebo_plugins packages. For questions or troubleshooting the conversion process, please make use of ROS Answers or the gazebo mailing list.
Lastly, you might have noticed that the gazebo project has been migrated from sourceforge to kforge (see the gazebo project page on kforge), please submit gazebo-specific tickets to the new trac and feel free to checkout the mercurial repository.
Thanks, John
crossposted from WillowGarage.com
Willow Garage is proud to announce our collaboration with Adept Technology. Along with Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), the three organizations are working together to contribute to the ROS-Industrial project. There is more information in Adept's official announcement.
ROS-Industrial has now demonstrated control of an Adept Viper 650, 6-axis industrial robot arm. This is the second robot vendor that has demonstrated a ROS-Industrial interface. This achievement demonstrates the ability of ROS-Industrial to leverage the functionality and capablities within ROS across different robot vendor hardware and configurations. Because ROS-Industrial aims to standardize the interfaces to industrial arms in general, high level application functionality will be able to be deployed across hardware platforms. Even today, the capabilities within ROS-Industrial, including path planning and dynamic pick and place, far exceed the capabilities of any commercially available robot software. ROS-Industrial enables new applications and broadens the industrial robot market.
Please see the ROS-Industrial site to find out more.
19-20 May 2012 (immediately following ICRA)
St. Paul, Minnesota, USA
Important links:
Please join us this May for the inaugural edition of ROSCon!
ROSCon 2012 is a chance for ROS developers of all levels, beginner to expert, to spend an extraordinary weekend learning from and networking with the ROS community. Get tips and tricks from experts, network, and share ideas with fellow developers from around the globe.
ROSCon is a developers' conference, in the model of PyCon and BoostCon. The two-day program will comprise tech talks and tutorials that will introduce you to new tools and libraries, and teach you more about the ones you already know.
We received an overwhelming number of session proposals, which made for some tough decisions in the review process, and an acceptance rate of 27%. The program includes in-depth coverage of fundamentals, like tf and URDF, and introductions to higher-level concepts, like motion planning and multi-robot systems. We'll also hear about interesting applications of ROS, from teaching to field robotics. And we have two excellent keynotes, from Morgan Quigley of Stanford (and original author of ROS) and Julia M. Badger of NASA JSC.
We have some great sponsors to thank: Bosch, Motoman, Clearpath, Heartland, Willow Garage, CoroWare, Schunk, and Yujin. We're excited to have such strong industry support!
Registration is now open at roscon.ros.org.
If you have any questions, send email to info@roscon.ros.org.
Hi ROS community,
We finally created a planet (an aggregation of developer blogs) as is common among big open source projects (kernel, python, ubuntu, fedora, apache ...).
Please enjoy: planet.ros.org/
Wanna join ? have any comment/bug to report ? Please follow the instructions on the website !
Regards,
Vincent Rabaud
Announcement by Daniel Stonier of Yujin to ros-users
Hi all,
Just a quick bump for those that might be interested in zero-configuration on android. I've got a rough working implementation with a couple of demo apps. The underlying jmdns still has a few rough edges, but am currently working with the developer to fix these. Since we're actively looking at issues now, it is probably an appropriate time to query others who might have an interest in seeing feature x or y to be implemented.
There is a review page at on the ROS wiki. Links to docs, code and demos can be found there.
If you have any comments, please add them there.
Regards,
Daniel Stonier
By popular demand, the deadline for submitting a proposal for a ROSCon session has been extended to 11 December 2011. Please send proposals to submit@roscon.ros.org.
Hilton Garden Inn St. Paul City Center
St. Paul, Minnesota
19-20 May 2012
(immediately following ICRA)
Details: http://roscon.ros.org/ Proposals: submit@roscon.ros.org Questions: info@roscon.ros.org
ROSCon 2012 is a chance for ROS developers of all levels, beginner to expert, to spend an extraordinary weekend learning from and networking with the ROS community. Get tips and tricks from experts, network, and share ideas with fellow developers from around the globe.
ROSCon is a developers' conference, in the model of PyCon and BoostCon. The two-day program will comprise tech talks and tutorials that will introduce you to new tools and libraries, and teach you more about the ones you already know. The bulk of the program will be 30-40-minute presentations (some may be longer or shorter).
Want to present at ROSCon? Submit a proposal! For details on proposing, go to roscon.ros.org/
If you don't want to make a formal presentation, you should still bring your new project or idea to ROSCon!
There will be several sessions of Lightning Talks, which are 5-minute mini-talks that are scheduled just-in-time at the conference. There will also be open space for Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) meetings, impromptu hacking sessions, and informal presentations.
On behalf of the ROSCon 2012 Organizing Committee:
Ryan Gariepy, Clearpath Robotics
Brian Gerkey, Willow Garage
Cédric Pradalier, ETH Zürich
Matthew Williamson, Heartland Robotics
This year ROS celebrates another anniversary--four years of a great community building open-source libraries for robotics.
We're excited to celebrate this milestone by announcing ROSCon 2012, the first ROS developer's conference. On May 19-20 in St. Paul, Minnesota (following ICRA), ROS developers from around the globe will gather to learn, share, exchange, and network on all topics ROS.
The conference features:
The call for presentation proposals is now open, and the deadline for submissions is 12/4/2011. To learn more, go to http://roscon.ros.org/.
By all measures, the ROS community has doubled in size since last year. The number of open-source, public code repositories grew from 50 in 2010 to 126 in 2011, and the number of ROS packages increased from 1643 to 3128. This explosive growth was driven in large part by the release of the Microsoft Kinect and has resulted in many new innovative applications.
If you're interested in more information on the growth of ROS, you can see your community metrics report from 2011.
The third ROS distribution release, Diamondback, kicked off 2011 with Kinect and OpenNI compatibility, as well as smaller, easier-to-use libraries. Diamondback also introduced our open stack release system, which enables contributors around the world to provide their libraries as part of the ROS distributions.
The fourth and most recent release, Electric Emys, marked a milestone by providing complete, stable libraries for arm_navigation and PCL to complement upgraded build, communication, navigation, and image processing libraries.
Electric Emys also expanded ROS support so you can use it on various low-powered platforms and more operating systems. There are much-improved capabilities on:
Thanks to the developers above that made this possible. Thanks also go to the many institutions and individuals that have used the new stack release system to contribute libraries to the Diamondback and Electric releases, including:
ROS is now in use on so many platforms and in such a variety of applications that it's difficult to have a centralized planning process for releases. Building on the ROS Enhancement Proposal (REP) process, the special interest groups (SIGs) you've created now plan future releases of ROS. Anyone can create one. Anyone can participate and contribute.
In addition to the REP and SIG processes, more community members are stepping forward to take over core ROS libraries to guide their development. Thank you to Chad Rockey (laser_drivers), Brett Grandbois (dynamic_reconfigure), and Ruben Smits (orocos_kinematics_dynamics) for taking on this important responsibility, as well as thanks to Jack O'Quin (camera_drivers) for his continued and excellent stewardship.
A final thank you goes to the many, many people that make answers.ros.org happen -- it is the primary resource for helping users get things done. In particular, thanks to the frequent contributors: Christian Dornhege, Eric Perko, Jack O'Quin, Martin Günther, Lorenz Mösenlechner, Michael Carroll, Koen Buys, Ivan Dryanovski, Chad Rockey, Andy Somerville, Mac Mason, Felix Endres, Patrick Goebel, Dimitri Prosser, David Lu, Antons Rebguns, Stefan Kohlbrecher, and Raphael Favier.
ROS Fuerte Turtle and ROS Groovy Galapagos will be released in 2012. Fuerte, the March 2012 release, has 16 SIGs in the open-source robotics community collaborating on many improvements to ROS communication protocols and tools, as well as the libraries for motion planning, perception, manipulation, and simulation. Fuerte focuses on making libraries better and easier to use, both with and without ROS middleware. The build infrastructure will undergo major changes, and hopefully you can use these numerous libraries in more applications.
ROSCon 2012 happens in May, and we hope the many people that make ROS happen -- REP writers, SIG participants, stack maintainers, answers.ros.org participants -- can meet all under one roof and carry us on to ROS Groovy Galapagos!
We'd like to welcome two new maintainers to the ROS core system. Chad Rockey from NREC will be maintaining imu_drivers and laser_drivers, and Brett Grandbois from CSIRO will be maintaining dynamic_reconfigure. We're excited to see members of the community stepping up to perform this important role. Stack maintainers direct and facilitate the development of the libraries they oversee -- releases like ROS Electric can't happen without their hard work, so thanks to Chad and Brett for stepping up.
SwRI and the Motoman Robotics Division of Yaskawa America have announced that they will be collaborating to integrate Motoman® robots and ROS. SwRI's work with autonomous cars and ROS was featured in the ROS 3rd anniversary clip. The press release is included below:
SAN ANTONIO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and the Motoman Robotics Division of Yaskawa America, Inc. have entered into a memorandum of understanding to collaborate on integrating Motoman Robotics' line of industrial robots with the open-source ROS (Robot Operating System) software.
The collaboration will seek to develop, demonstrate and release to the open-source community an interface between Motoman® robots and ROS.
Motoman Robotics' line of industrial robots covers a variety of industrial automation applications in nearly every industry. ROS provides an open framework for developing advanced robotic solutions. It has a growing community of developers focusing on open-source software stacks for all aspects of robotic systems.
SwRI, as an independent, non-profit applied research and development organization, provides expertise in bringing fundamental research and technology to bear in industrial applications.
ROS Electric Emys is now officially available! This amped up, current release of ROS features new, stable libraries for arm navigation and point cloud processing. There is also improved support for Android, Arduino, Windows, ARM, and Python 3. Please see the release page for some of the cool new tools and libraries in Electric, such as "interactive markers" for creating custom GUIs in RViz.
Many thanks to the ROS community for making this release possible. In order to better recognize your contributions, we have started an authors and contributors list. The numerous libraries, features, and bug fixes that you have provided enable ROS to run faster, better and on more platforms. We also appreciate the many contributors on answers.ros.org who make using ROS a better experience for everyone.
Please see the ROS Electric Emys page for more information on what's new in Electric, how to migrate from Diamondback, and how to download the release.
ROS Electric Release Candidate 1 is now available. Thanks to all of you who have participated in the ROS Electic Beta process. We have been able to fix numerous issues as well as bring many more stacks into compatibility with Electric.
During this release candidate, we ask users of platforms like OS X, Arch, Fedora, Gentoo, OpenSUSE, Debian, and Slackware to please verify the ROS Electric installation instructions for those platforms.
A super mega thanks for this RC1 goes to:
This RC1 is limited to robot-generic software. Users of specific robot platforms like the PR2 should wait for system integrators to give the go-ahead on those platforms.
For a list of updates that ROS Electric provides, please see the ROS Electric Beta announcement.
Debian packages are now available for the ROS Electric Beta release. This beta release is in feature freeze: stacks that have reached "1.0" status will only receive bug fixes from this point forward so that others can easily integrate with this new release.
non-Ubuntu Linux users: We are still completing integration of Electric with non-Ubuntu Linux platforms, we do not recommend you use this release on those platforms.
stack maintainers: now is a good time to test your stacks for compatibility with Electric as we are in feature freeze. You can check the debian build status page to see if your stack is currently compatible with Electric.
ROS Electric is one of our biggest releases in terms of new features, so we will need your help making the final release as good as possible. We have always strived to integrate mobility, manipulation, and perception libraries together in ROS, so we are very proud that perception_pcl, based on the PCL 1.1 release, and arm_navigation are both reaching their first stable release in ROS. There are also great new features like "interactive markers" in RViz, improved URDF/COLLADA libraries, tf optimizations, and more.
You will be able to use ROS Electric on more platforms than ever before: Android, Arduino, and even Windows. All three are still very unstable and will need a lot of community support to get to stable releases in Fuerte, but we encourage you to try them out and give feedback. We have also updated rosdep (REP 111, REP 112) to make it more extensible and provide more integration options on platforms like OS X.
Changes in Electric may require updating your software for compatibility. One of the biggest changes we are making is moving more thirdparty ROS packages to be standard system installs. For example, OpenCV is now installed via the same debian package provided in the standalone release. This move towards standard system installs enables greater code portability and streamlines integration, but it does in some cases require changes to your build files in order to integrate properly. Also, although we strive for backwards compatibility, changes in thirdparty libraries as well as removal of deprecated features may require updates to code.
Many of the other updates are to reorganize software to be smaller, more modular, and easier to maintain. We have taken advantage of the new 'unary stacks' feature to release pluginlib, filters, xacro, and stage separately. In general, we have broken apart the common and geometry stacks into smaller components and we have also transferred ownership of the kdl package (orocos_kinematics_dynamics stack) to the Orocos developers -- this is a trend that we hope to continue moving forward.
What's new (More at http://www.ros.org/wiki/electric/Planning):
ros::Message base class,
rosrecord package, roslib/Header|Clock|Log)As this is still the beta period, documentation is still in flux. We appreciate your support and contributions with finding out-of-date documentation in addition to filing tickets for any bugs or other issues that you may find.
Yesterday at Google I/O, developers at Google and Willow Garage
announced a new rosjava library
that is the first pure-Java implementation of ROS. This new library
was developed at Google with the goal of enabling advanced Android
apps for robotics.
The library, tools, and hardware that come with Android devices are well-suited for robotics. Smartphones and tablets are sophisticated computation devices with useful sensors and great user-interaction capabilities. Android devices can also be extended with additional sensor and actuators thanks to the Open Accessory and Android @ Home APIs that were announced at Google I/O,
The new rosjava is currently in alpha release mode and is still under active development, so there will be changes to the API moving forward. For early adopters, there are Android tutorials to help you send and receive sensor data to a robot.
This announcement was part of a broader talk on Cloud Robotics, which was given by Ryan Hickman and Damon Kohler of Google, as well Ken Conley and Brian Gerkey of Willow Garage. This talk discusses the many possibilities of harnessing the cloud for robotics applications, from providing capabilities like object recognition and voice services, to reducing the cost of robotics hardware, to enabling the development of user interfaces in the cloud that connect to robots remotely. With the new rosjava library, ROS developers can now take advantage of the Android platform to connect more easily to cloud services.
ROS just reached a new milestone: 100 public, open-source repositories! From top robotics research labs around the world to companies to hobbyists, these repositories hold the many contributions of the quickly growing ROS community. Back in November when we celebrated the third anniversary of ROS, we had just hit 52 repositories. In six months, that number has nearly doubled.
The 100th repository is rl-texplore-ros-pkg from the University of Texas at Austin and focuses on the area of reinforcement learning. We look forward to their contributions, along with the many other members of the ROS community that have helped us reach this milestone.
Announcement from Radu Rusu/Willow Garage
The Point Cloud Library (PCL) moved today to its new home at PointClouds.org. Now that quality 3D point cloud sensors like the Kinect are cheaply available, the need for a stable 3D point cloud-processing library is greater than ever before. This new site provides a home for the exploding PCL developer community that is creating novel applications with these sensors.
PCL contains numerous state-of-the art algorithms for 3D point cloud processing, including filtering, feature estimation, surface reconstruction, registration, model fitting and segmentation. These algorithms can be used, for example, to filter outliers from noisy data, stitch 3D point clouds together, segment relevant parts of a scene, extract keypoints and compute descriptors to recognize objects in the world based on their geometric appearance, and create surfaces from point clouds and visualize them -- to name a few.
This new site also celebrate the one year anniversary of PCL. The official development for PCL started in March 2010 at Willow Garage. Our goal was to create a library that can support the type of 3D point cloud algorithms that mobile manipulation and personal robotics need, and try to combine years of experience in the field into coherent framework. PCL's grandfather, Point Cloud Mapping, was developed just a few months earlier, and it served as an important building block in Willow Garage's Milestone 2. Based on these experiences, PCL was launched to bring world-class research in 3D perception together into a single software library. PCL would enable developers to harness the potential of the quickly growing 3D sensor market for robotics and other industries.
For this occasion, we put together a video that present the development of PCL over time.
The launch of the Kinect sensor in November 2010 turned many eyes on PCL, and its user community quickly multiplied. We turned our focus on stabilizing and improving the usability of PCL so that users would be able to develop applications on top. We are now proud to announce that the upcoming release of PCL features a complete Kinect (OpenNI) camera grabber, which allows users to get data directly in PCL and operate on it. PCL has already been used by many of the entries in the ROS 3D contest, showing the potential of Kinect and ROS. Please check our website for tutorials on how to visualize and integrate Kinect data directly in your application.
The PCL development team is current working hard towards a 1.0 release. PCL 1.0 will focus on modularity and enable deployment of PCL on different computational devices.
We are proud to be part of an extremely active community. Our development team spawns over three continents and five countries, and it includes prestigious engineers and scientists from institutions such as: AIST, University of California Berkeley, University of Bonn, University of British Columbia, ETH Zurich, University of Freiburg, Intel Research Seattle, LAAS/CNRS, MIT, NVidia, University of Osnabrück, Stanford University, University of Tokyo, TUM, Vienna University of Technology, Willow Garage, and Washington University in St. Louis.
PCL is proudly supported by Willow Garage, NVidia, and Google Summer of Code 2011. For more information please check http://www.pointclouds.org/about.html.
PCL wouldn't have become what it is today without the help of many people. Thank you to our tremendous community, especially our contributors and developers who have worked so hard to make PCL more stable, more user friendly, and better documented. We hope that PCL will help you solve more 3D perception problems, and we look forward to your contributions!
- Description
- Examples
- Installation
- Topics / Services
- Parameters
The ROS News Voltron-bot has grown by one: I Heart Robotics is now writing news, tutorial, and other posts on ROS. Like ROS itself, we want the ROS News site to be for the community, by the community, and we're excited to have a regular contributor to ROS help join that effort.
I Heart Robotics has long been a great resource for the ROS and the broader robotics community. From regular news posts, to reviews of ROS drivers, to tutorials for ROS, iheartrobotics.com is full of great content for ROS users. There is also iheart-ros-pkg, which provides drivers, tools, and demos.
I Heart Robotics will still be running posts over at IHeartRobotics.com, so be sure to add it to your news reader (if you haven't already). You may also drop by store.iheartengineering.com to see if there's anything useful you can use to build your robot (or look good while doing it).
Greetings all,
We've had a need to develop test and debugging apps for our test and factory
engineers, who, unfortunately (for them!), only use windows. While service
robotics' patched ros tree could give us msvc apps, it wasn't patched into
ros mainstream and it couldn't let us share our own testing apps on linux
with the test engineers on windows without building two of each application.
So...enter mingw cross <http://mingw-cross-env.nongnu.org/>! We've now got
this patched in eros/ros up to being able to run a talker/listener and add
int server/client along with inbuilt support for qt as well.
If you're interested in being a guinea pig to test this, or just curious,
you can find a tutorial on the ros wiki here:
http://www.ros.org/wiki/eros/Tutorials/Qt-Ros on Windows
If you come across any bugs (in the tutorial or the installation), reply to
this email, or contact me on irc in OFTC #ros so we can squash the buggers.
Hopefully as time goes by we can patch support in for other commonly used
ros packages as well as adding rosdeps upstream to the mingw cross
environment. We also aim to get ros running on msvc in a more complete way,
but that will need to wait for the rebuild of the ros build environment that
is looming.
Cheers!
Daniel Stonier (Yujin Robot)
There's a brand-new answers.ros.org site to help you ask questions about ROS and have them answered by a community of ROS experts. It's like Stack Overflow, but all the questions are about ROS, and it's powered by the open-source AskBot platform.
Melonee and Tully have been hard at work on this the past couple of weeks and explained their motivation in their announcment to ros-users:
Over the last couple months we've seen an increase in the volume of emails on ros-users and no one likes too many emails. So we put together answers.ros.org to provide an alternative forum for asking and answering questions. If you really love getting all that email you can still have it by signing up for answers.ros.org and setup your profile to receive all traffic like before. However if you prefer lower volume you can filter based on tags (whitelist or blacklist). This does not mean we're doing away with ros-users, we would like to use this mailing list more for announcements and general discussion rather than individual troubleshooting. We would to like to encourage everyone to signup at answers.ros.org. Go ask questions and provide answers as usual.
Some of you may be wondering, "Why don't you just use Stack Overflow?"
The ROS Answers site, we hope, will provide a better experience for users. All of the tags will be related to ROS -- you can even subscribe to questions about a particular package/stack. We also hope that we will be able to use the open-source AskBot platform to have tight integration with the ROS wiki. In the future, look for wiki macros and other navigation tweaks to help you find the information you need more effectively.
Also, you may be wondering "When should one use answers.ros.org vs. the ros-users mailing list?" Well, there's an answer for that.
Lastly:
If you have questions or feedback about the site use "answers.ros.org" as the tag so that we get your feedback.
We were absolutely thrilled with eighteen entries to the ROS 3D Contest. The community really impressed us with creativity and technical prowess in these entries, and choosing the prizes was a difficult process. In fact, so difficult that we bent the rules and created two new prizes: 4th Overall and 2nd place Most Useful.
For the Overall prizes, we selected the entries that both amazed us and embraced the spirit of the contest: inspiring and providing building blocks for future Kinect hackers. We've been able to try many of these entries on our own thanks to the great code and documentation, and we hope that others will as well. It was hard to pick a favorite, but we kept coming back to Garratt Gallagher's Customizable Buttons. We tried it on our own desks, and it just puts a smile on your face: you draw a button whereever you please and press it. It made us feel like we were in a cartoon world where we could bend the rules of the universe. Garratt was also the most prolific -- with his six different entries, you can deconstruct the various components that he was able to assemble to produce very different results.
For second place, we selected Quadrotor Altitude and Obstacle Avoidance by the STARMAC project at Berkeley. We loved seeing what a Quadrotor with an Atom processor could do, and they went the extra mile to make sure others with quadrotors had a good starting point. For third place, Taylor Veltrop's Humanoid Teleoperation entry just kept getting better and better. He recently used his library to win best performance in the Robot Athlete Cup 2011 competition by doing robo-ikebana. We added a fourth place for Person Tracking and Reconstruction from a Mobile Base with a 7 DOF Manipulator by Chris Burbridge & Lorenzo Riano. Using a robot to turn a Kinect into a 3D scanner holds many possibilities.
For Most Useful, we were wowed. First prize went to RGBD-6D-SLAM from the University of Freiburg. SLAM with a Kinect holds the potential to unlock many applications, from creating 3D maps and 3D models to cheap autonomous navigation and much, much more. Normally "bleeding edge" means no one else can run it, but, in their case, they produced a 6D-SLAM solution that we were able to download and use in our own offices. There is much to improve, but the potential is huge. For second place, we chose ETH Zurich's Automatic Calibration of Extrinsic Parameters. Anyone mounting a Kinect on their robot should take a look at using their library.
Finally, our PrimeSense Dev Kit 5.0 Awards (thanks PrimeSense) go to Michael Ferguson and the Chemnitz University of Technology. We are confident, from their entries, that they will be able to put them to good use.
Thanks everyone!
Overall:
1st Place ($3000): Customizable Buttons, Garratt Gallagher
2nd Place ($2000): Quadrotor Altitude and Obstacle Avoidance, Patrick Bouffard
3rd Place ($1000): Humanoid Teleoperation, Taylor Veltrop
4th Place ($500): Person Tracking and Reconstruction from a Mobile Base with a 7 DOF Manipulator, Chris Burbridge & Lorenzo Riano
Most Useful:
1st Place ($2000): RGBD-6D-SLAM, Felix Endres, Juergen Hess, Nikolas Engelhard, Juergen Sturm, Daniel Kuhner, Philipp Ruchti, and Wolfram Burgard
2nd Place ($1000): Automatic Calibration of Extrinsic Parameters, François Pomerleau, Francis Colas and Stéphane Magnenat
PrimeSense Dev Kit 5.0 Awards:
ROS 3D Contest not enough for you? PrimseSense is sponsoring a contest to develop a natural interaction interface for a Web browser, with $20K as the top prize. For more details, see the OpenNI Developers Challenge.
Today is the deadline for entries in the ROS 3D Contest. There's already a lot of great entries and we're looking forward to the judging.
We continue to strive to make the ROS development process more open, from REPs to exploring a ROS Foundation. One need identified by the community was making it easier to get involved in the core ROS development. It hasn't been clear what features could be developed by those looking to get into ROS core development. To facilitate that, we've setup a simple mechanism to expose open issues which are not actively being worked of to the community.
These new "Handoff Lists" link to feature enhancements that we think are good places to get started as a ROS hacker. We have only just started on adding tickets to this list and will hopefully add even more over time. If you'd like to contribute, these tickets are a good way to get familiar with parts of the code base and development process.
We promised you some early holiday Kinect presents, and we hope you like what you've seen:
We've been impressed with what we've seen from you:
In fact, hacks based on ROS, PCL, or OpenCV took three out of the seven "best kinect hacks" on TechCrunch.
Now, it's time to take it up a notch.
We invite you to combine an RGB-D sensor (e.g. Kinect, PSDK5.0) with ROS to produce something new, interesting, and fun. It could be anything, from a novel robot control interface to a data-driven art project to pure computer vision. Bonus points if it's also useful (see below). We're offering $8K in prizes.
As we promote open-source software, we encourage participants to share, and our rules and judging will reward participants who act in the spirit of collaboration.
Deadline: All entries must be submitted by January 23, 2011.
We will be using the Iron Chef judging system to rate each entry:
Taste (10 pts)
Presentation (i.e. Documentation) (5 pts)
Originality (5 pts)
For the "taste" score, judges will take into account how well each entry uses the "secret ingredients" (ROS + RGB-D).
For the "originality" score, credit will go to the first entry (by date) to demonstrate a particular idea. Your entry can still be "original" even if subsequent entries use the same idea.
A special "Most Useful" prize will be awarded to the entry that provides the most useful, re-usable capabilities to the open-source community. As evidence of usefulness, judges will be biased towards entries that are used by other contest participants. This includes contributions to the underlying ROS drivers and OpenNI integration.
Contest Deadline: January 23, 2011
Enter early, enter often!
PrimeSenseâ„¢ is launching the OpenNIâ„¢ organization, an open effort to help foster "Natural Interaction"â„¢ applications. As part of this effort, PrimeSense is releasing open source drivers for the RGB-D sensor that powers the Kinectâ„¢ and other devices such as PrimeSense's Development Kit 5.0 (PSDK 5.0) and are making the HW available for the OpenNI developers community! This will unlock full support for their sensor and also provide a commercially supported implementation. They are also releasing an open-source OpenNI API, which provides a common middleware for applications to access RGB-D sensors. Finally, they are releasing Windows and Linux binaries for the NITE skeleton-tracking library, which will enable developers to use OpenNI to create gesture and other natural-interaction applications. We at Willow Garage have been working with PrimeSense to help launch the open-source drivers and are happy to join PrimeSense in leading the OpenNI organization.
PrimeSense's RGB-D sensor is the start of a bright future of mass-market available 3D sensors for robotics and other applications. The OpenNI organization will foster and accelerate the use of 3D perception for human-computer/robot interaction, as well as help future sensors, libraries, and applications remain compatible as these technologies rapidly evolve.
For the past several weeks, we've been working with members of the libfreenect/OpenKinect community to provide open-source drivers, and we have already begun work to quickly integrate PrimeSense's contributions with these efforts. We will be using the full sensor API to provide better data for computer vision libraries, such as access to the factory calibration and image registration. We are also working on wrapping the NITEâ„¢ skeleton and handpoint tracking libraries into ROS. Having access to skeleton tracking will bring about "Minority Report" interfaces even faster. The common OpenNI APIs will also help the open-source community easily exchange libraries and applications that build on top. We've already seen many great RGB-D hacks -- we can't wait to see what will happen with the full power of the sensor and community unleashed.
This release was made possible by the many efforts of the open-source community. PrimeSense was originally planning on releasing these open-source drivers later, but the huge open-source Kinect community convinced them to accelerate their efforts and release now. They will be doing a more "formal" release in early 2011, but this initial access should give the developer community many new capabilities to play with over the holidays. As this is an early "alpha" release, we are still integrating the full capabilities and the ROS documentation is still being prepared. Stay tuned for some follow-up posts on how to start using these drivers and NITE with ROS.
PrimeSense's PSDK 5.0 is available separately and has several advantages for robotics: it is powered solely by USB, and the sensor package is smaller and lighter than the Kinect. This simplifies integration and will be important for use in smaller robots like quadrotors. PrimeSense is making a limited number of PrimeSense developer kits available for purchase. Please visit here to sign up to purchase the PSDK5.0.
You can visit OpenNI.org to find out more about the OpenNI organization and get binaries builds of these releases. Developers interested in working with the source code can checkout the repositories on GitHub and join the discussion groups at at groups.google.com/group/openni-dev. For more information about OpenNI, please visit OpenNI.org. To follow the efforts of the ROS community and Kinect, please join the ros-kinect mailing list.
