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Looking foward to ROSCon 2018 we're highlighting presentations from last year.

Justin presents a new approach to building web interfaces for ROS applications.

Video

Abstract

This talk will introduce a set of web components, built on top of Robot Web Tools, that make it easy to build complex, ROS-integrated web applications without writing much code. Using the Polymer library with these components helps to make applications that are accessible and mobile-friendly. We will show how to use these components and show some common web programming patterns. Additionally, we will showcase some complex web applications we have developed with these tools, including a programming by demonstration interface, a web-based version of RViz, and a ROS graph explorer utility.

Slides

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The first officially licensed local ROSCon event, ROSCon JP 2018, was held in Tokyo, Japan on the 14th of September. ROSCon JP 2018 was held in conjunction with the Open Source Robotics Foundation.

189 people participated on the day (excluding sponsors' invitations and staff). The livestream had a steady 60 to 70 people watching at any one time throughout the day. Thanks to all the participants, ROSCon JP was an exciting day for all. Presentation slides and videos will be published on the website in a few weeks.

The invited talks from Brian Gerkey (Open Robotics) and Nicholas Yeo (ROS-Industrial Asia Pacific), 14 submitted talks, 13 lightning talks, 26 exhibitors' booths, and everything else about the conference was of high quality. Topics of presentation included

• a presentation from Panasonic comparing navigation using the navstack with using commercial navigation system for hospital delivery robots;

• the use of ROS in space robotics by JAXA;

• the application of ROS and Gazebo to a marine robotics challenge (which finished with a surge in donations to the presenters' crowdfunding page to help them attend the next challenge); and

• a discussion of how Sony applied ROS to the development of the newest Aibo. (Find out more at ROSCon 2018 in Madrid)

A catered lunch and reception and a popular exhibitors' hall provided many opportunities for participants to mix with each other and make new connections.

Sponsors

ROSCon JP 2018 was sponsored by the following companies and organisations:

Platinum: Sony

Gold: Renesas, Seqsense, Tier IV, iSiD, Analog Devices, TIS, SICK

Silver: eSOL, GROOVE X, EAMS Lab

Bronze: Honda Research Institute Japan, RT Corporation, Mamezou, INTEC, Robotis, Z Robotix

Friendship: Tokyo Opensource Robotics Kyokai Association

As our first event, we consider ROSCon JP 2018 to have been a massive success and a credit to the Japanese ROS user community.

Looking foward to ROSCon 2018 we're highlighting presentations from last year.

Chris presents a new approach for integrating ROS using Node.js as an alternative to the rosbridge suite.

Video

Abstract

For years, the RosBridge suite (and it's corresponding javascript library roslibjs) have been the most practical way to integrate ROS and javascript. While this combination works fairly well in light-weight applications or as a prototype solution for pumping ROS topics into a web page, it starts to break down as the demands on the system increase. With the rise in popularity of backend javascript engines, particularly Node.js, relying on RosBridge to connect ROS and javascript code becomes a bottleneck in industrial applications with serious performance requirements. New web technologies (like Electron) also make the prospect of integrating a native ROS client library in Node.js more appealing.

Slides

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Looking foward to ROSCon 2018 we're highlighting presentations from last year.

Michael presents on how to bring ROS into safety critical systems.

Video

Abstract

This presentation gives an overview about our "Kontrol" development environment for safety critical controllers using ROS and Gazebo. We first analyze existing standards for safety critical controllers for different applications and present the results of an extensive industry survey which concludes that 70-80% of the development costs are spent during the serial development phase. To overcome this burden, we present our approach of a model-based development environment which significantly reduces this cost. We show how ROS and Gazebo can be integrated into one development tool. Finally, we demonstrate the automatic code generation for ROS and ROS2 nodes using Scilab.

Slides

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Looking foward to ROSCon 2018 we're highlighting presentations from last year.

Ingo presented how determinism can effect a robotic system. The talk provides an overview of causes of non-determinism. Followed by specific examples of diagnosing determinism in a robotic system and the benefits of eliminating the sources of non-determinism.

Video

Abstract

ROS's foundational style, the asynchronous, loosely coupled compute graph, is great for re-use and distribution, but there's a catch: Nothing guarantees execution ordering. This means, the order in which callbacks and timers are executed can change even when inputs are the same. In many important cases, this leads to different results, and - subtly or not so subtly - changes the robot's behavior. As an example, in the common movebase node, we found reaction times changing between 50 and 200ms, while pure computation time was only 20ms. I will show why this happens, and how to address it, both in the movebase and in general.

Slides

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Looking foward to ROSCon 2018 we're highlighting presentations from last year.

Martin and Sergio present an overview of TRADR as well as ROS packages and tools they've developed in the course of the project. Most of the tools have been released as open source packages. And at the end they present some real world use cases where their robots were helpful.

Video

Abstract

Search and Rescue Robotics is an extremely challenging and broad area of robotics that has recently been experiencing enormous progress. In the last 3 years, the EU project TRADR investigated many aspects of the aforementioned field. With this talk, we would like to share with the ROS community the experience acquired in the development of our system based on advanced use of ROS, in testing and using various hardware, and in dealing with end-users that compose the human-robot teams during search and rescue missions.

Slides

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Looking foward to ROSCon 2018 we're highlighting presentations from last year.

Darby presents the OpenManipulator and easy way to get into manipulation.

Video

Abstract

This announcement will talk about an OpenManipulator, one of TurtleBot3 Friends. The previous TurtleBot series was able to perform the manipulation function through 'TurtleBot Arm'. In TurtleBot3, the function will be 'OpenManipulator'. ROS-enabled OpenManipulator is a full open robot platform consisting of OpenSoftware, OpenHardware and OpenCR(Embedded board). It is expected that ROS users will be able to upgrade TurtleBot3 with ease. Our goal is to support most of the functionality we need as a service, academic, research and educational robot platform through TurtleBot 3 and OpenManipulator.

Slides

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Looking foward to ROSCon 2018 we're highlighting presentations from last year.

Marco introduces the easy_hadeye package using motivation from his groups research using multiple systems.

Video

Abstract

Hand-Eye calibration is a "necessary evil" for enabling the interaction between a robot and its environment, including humans. Determining the precise geometric transformation between the coordinate systems of the robot and the utilized camera(s) is as annoying as it is important in order to avoid errors of multiple centimeters already at a meter distance. easy handeye is a new ROS package that aims at facilitating the computation and management of Hand-Eye calibration, while keeping the library completely generic with respect to hardware and encouraging the user to employ best practices known to date.

Slides

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Looking foward to ROSCon 2018 we're highlighting presentations from last year.

Levi gives a brief introduction to the Noether package from ROS Industrial.

Video

Abstract

This proposal covers the development of a framework for the automated generation of efficient tool path plans from 3D geometry for industrial processes such as painting or sanding. The work is organized into three main software modules. The first module analyzes 3D data to extract features salient to the desired process. The second module works on these features to generate tool paths that optimally perform the process on individual features. The final module, sequence planning, determines the optimal ordering for processing the entire part.

Slides

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Looking foward to ROSCon 2018 we're highlighting presentations from last year.

Ruben and Perrine present the Tango ROS Streamer which shows how to turn your Tango enabled device into a rich datasource for a ROS robot.

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Abstract

For developers who want to extend their robot with new sensors for indoor positioning and 3D perception, Intermodalics created the Tango ROS Streamer App. This Android app for Tango compatible devices provides real-time 3D pose estimates using Tango's visual-inertial odometry (VIO) algorithms, camera images and point clouds into the ROS ecosystem. The app is already freely available on the PlayStore and its code is fully open source..

Slides

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Looking foward to ROSCon 2018 we're highlighting presentations from last year.

Jordan Allspaw presents ROS.NET as a way to integrate with managed .NET applications to communicate with ROS.

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Abstract

We introduce ROS.NET, a series of C# projects that allow a managed .NET application to communicate with traditional ROS nodes, we then present a wrapper for it that allows Unity applications to integrate with ROS. Unity is a game design tool which can be used as a 3d rendering engine and a physics engine. We present two applications of combining ROS and Unity, one in the form of a ROS Virtual Reality engine, usable for robot visualization and control, and another in the form of a Project Tango device driver, which can also be used for visualization and control, and which we plan to augment for 3d scanning and reconstruction.

Slides

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Looking foward to ROSCon 2018 we're highlighting presentations from last year.

Adam Alami presents an analysis of how the ROS community maintains quality of the code as well as identifying areas to grow.

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Abstract

As part of the EU H2020 project ROSIN promoting the usage of ROS for industrial applications, we investigate how the ROS community takes care of quality. The goal is to understand quality problems and to address them. We will report our preliminary findings based on a.) analysis of bug reports in ROS packages and ROS based projects; b.) interviews with both junior and core members of the ROS community; and c.) analysis of the ROS wiki and other available resources.

Slides

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

Gajamohan presents on how Rapyuta has designed their platform Rapyuta.io to help accelerate robotic development.

Video

Abstract

In this presentation, attendees will gain practical knowledge on how to use a cloud robotics Platform-as-a-Service (Paas) to significantly accelerate robot application development. Specifically, attendees will learn step-by-step how a robot application can be developed, remotely deployed, monitored, and debugged using a cloud robotics PaaS. This will be followed by a detailed technical breakdown of the rapyuta.io's internals so attendees may understand the underlying architecture and design. Finally, a case study will compare a commercial robotics application deployment using Amazon's Infrastructure-as-a-Service to one using the rapyuta.io cloud robotics PaaS to show the benefits and limitations of each approach.

Slides

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

Juan Camilo presents the tips tricks and hacks they have developed for using ROS on the underwater robot Aqua.

Video

Abstract

In this session we will share our experience and describe our approach to learning-based control. We do this for underwater (marine) environments where we want to approximate some of the hydrodynamic factors in 6 degrees of freedom. Our work addresses "learning to swim" via the automatic synthesis of swimming controllers for the AQUA platform: a six legged autonomous underwater vehicle. First, we will describe our approaches for simulating the underwater dynamics of the AQUA robot. This description includes our modelling choices and the integration into the Gazebo simulator. Second, we will describe the software interfaces we developed, based on the ROS framework, for testing learning algorithms in the simulation environment. Finally, we will show how ROS facilitated the use of our software on physical robots, and discuss the current research that our software has enabled.

Slides

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

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

Video

Abstract

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

Slides

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

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

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Abstract

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

Slides

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

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

Video

Abstract

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

Slides

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

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

Video

Abstract

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

Slides

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

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

Video

Abstract

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

Slides

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Looking foward to ROSCon 2018 we're highlighting presentations from last year. The ROSCon 2018 registration is currently open. As well as the Call for Proposals.

Finishing up the morning session Georgios and Stasinos presented rostune. A tool to help you understand the state of your ROS system better and how that can help you improve performance.

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Abstract

rostune is a tool that helps ROS developers distribute their nodes in the most effective way. It collects and visualizes statistics for topics and nodes, such as CPU usage and network usage. In this talk we are going to present technical details about rostune and a characteristic use case from an on-going project developing a home assistance robot, where processing can be distributed between the robot's on-board computer and computational units available at the home.

Slides

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Looking foward to ROSCon 2018 we're highlighting presentations from last year. The ROSCon 2018 registration is currently open. As well as the Call for Proposals.

Following the SROS presentation Aravind and Leonard follow up with a summary of Secure ROS another way to secure the ROS API.

Video

Abstract

Secure ROS is an update to ROS allowing secure communications while keeping ROS public API intact and allowing user code to be reused without modification. Policies are provided at execution time with a YAML file specifying authorized subscribers and publishers to topics, getters and setters to parameters, as well as providers and requesters of services. Policies are specified at the IP address level and enforced by Secure ROS. Combined with IPSec for cryptography, Secure ROS provides secure, authenticated and encrypted ROS communications. Modifications to the ROS code base is restricted to the ROS Master and client libraries (rospy and roscpp).

Slides

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Looking foward to ROSCon 2018 we're highlighting presentations from last year. The ROSCon 2018 registration is currently open. As well as the Call for Proposals.

Ruffin and Gianluca give an update on SROS progress since last year.

Video

Abstract

Introduced last year was a proof-of-concept implementation of SROS, an addition to the ROS ecosystem to support modern security. This talk will provide an update on developing REPS, with further details on proposed mechanics enabling application layer security for ROS. This includes Hardening APIs via full server/client validation, Standardized Policy Profile Syntax for access control of topics, services and parameters, and Integrated Policy Profile Autogeneration via auditing security log events. You'll gain a greater familiarity of SROS, its inner workings and direction, enabling you to contribute and provide feedback for the effort to secure robotics subsystems for the future.

Slides

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Looking foward to ROSCon 2018 we're highlighting presentations from last year. The ROSCon 2018 registration is currently open. As well as the Call for Proposals.

To show a real system running ROS Chris shows how ROS2 can be used to implement SLAM on a TurtleBot2.

Video

Abstract

This talk will focus on a larger application written entirely in ROS2. The application is a SLAM system (Google Cartographer) running on a Turtlebot2 using all underlying ROS2 components. The talk will describe the hardware and software setup of the robot, as well as porting and other challenges encountered while developing the application.

Slides

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Looking foward to ROSCon 2018 we're highlighting presentations from last year. The ROSCon 2018 registration is currently open. As well as the Call for Proposals.

Tony Wang and Jeff Gao present the motivation and design behind RoboWare. As well as an overview of how you can leverage RoboWare to develop ROS robots quickly.

Video

Abstract

RoboWare is a development kit specifically designed for ROS. It provides an integrated development environment, which has general purpose IDE functions? code editing, building and debugging; It fully supports ROS, including the creation and management of workspace, packages, libraries, nodes, msg/srv/action/launch/yaml/urdf files, etc. RoboWare supports "POD (Product Oriented Design)" development, it has a graphical designer for robot hardware architecture, the design diagram can be automatically exported as a ROS workspace for further development. It also provides a GUI development framework, which has plenty of robot-related controls and is cross-platform

Slides

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Looking foward to ROSCon 2018 we're highlighting presentations from last year. The ROSCon 2018 registration is currently open. As well as the Call for Proposals.

Jaime Martin Losa from eProsima presents on how to optimize the use of FastRTPS to tune ROS2 systems for better performance.

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Abstract

ROS2 has adopted DDS/RTPS as its middleware, increasing the performance and feature set over ROS1. DDS exposes many QoS parameters to adapt the middleware to very different scenarios, allowing easy configuration using XML files. This presentation will show how to set up ROS2 for several interesting scenarios.

Slides

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Looking foward to ROSCon 2018 we're highlighting presentations from last year. The ROSCon 2018 registration is currently open. As well as the Call for Proposals.

Twinkle Jain and Gene Cooperman present how they are using DMTCP to checkpoint ROS processes.

Video

Abstract

The ROS master is well-known to be a single point of failure. The DMTCP open-source package for transparent checkpoint-restart was recently extended to support checkpointrestart for the ROS master. After a failure, the ROS master is rolled back and resumed from the last checkpoint. Checkpoints can be performed as often as every few seconds. The DMTCP plugin model also allows users to add plugins that model and restart their external devices in a state equivalent to that at checkpoint. Finally, we speculate on the potential of DMTCP's distributed mode to support a global restore with appropriate plugins in the future.

Slides

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Looking foward to ROSCon 2018 we're highlighting presentations from last year. The ROSCon 2018 registration is currently open. As well as the Call for Proposals.

In this talk Dirk and Mikael focus on sharing a vision of how ROS2 will be useful in different use cases.

Video

Abstract

Using a concrete use case, this talk will describe the vision of how ROS 2 users will design and implement their autonomous systems from prototype to production. It will highlight features, either available already in ROS 2 or envisioned to become available in the future, and how they can be applied toward building more capable, flexible, and robust robotic systems. While the presentation starts with a simple application, it later utilizes more advanced features like introspection and orchestration capabilities to empower the system for more complex scenarios and harden it to the point of a production-ready system.

Slides

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Looking foward to ROSCon 2018 we're highlighting presentations from last year. The ROSCon 2018 registration is currently open. As well as the Call for Proposals.

The first talk at ROSCon 2017 was given by Shinpei Kato about the current state of Autoware a ROS-based open sources software platform for urban self driving mobility.

Video

Abstract

Autoware is open-source software (OSS) for urban self-driving mobility, empowered by ROS. It provides complete modules of perception, decision making, and control, which enables drive-by-wire vehicles to drive autonomously in public road environments. The current maintainer of Autoware is Tier IV, a Japanese academic startup company comprising professors and students. Automotive makers and suppliers now often use Autoware to build their research and development prototypes of self-driving mobility. Autoware has also been partly ported to ROS2. This talk will be of interest to any researchers, developers, and practitioners who are looking for opensource solution of self-driving mobility.

Slides

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Looking foward to ROSCon 2018 we're highlighting presentations from last year. The ROSCon 2018 registration is currently open. As well as the Call for Proposals.

To kick off this series we'll start with the ROSCon Opening Remarks. Brian Gerkey welcomes everyone and Tully Foote provides some perspective on the 10 years of ROS as we approached ROS's 10th anniversary.

Video

Slides

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We're happy to announce that the videos from ROSCon 2017 have been uploaded and are now linked from the program, thanks to the support of our video-archiving sponsor Ubuntu. If you were unable to attend, missed a talk, or want to listen again to get some more details now you can.

In addition we have posted slides from almost all the speakers as well. So if you want to get a link or other information you can do so now as well. The slides are linked alongside the videos from the program.

If you presented a Lightning Talk and want to provide more information, or if you were unable to secure a lightning talk slot I encourage you to make your announcement on Discourse in the ROS Projects category. If you're announcing a released ROS package send it to the General category. That way, more of the community will be aware of your projects and package contributions.

Thanks to everyone for coming and for your support! We sold out ROSCon for the third year in a row, with over 475 attendees. And thank you to our record-breaking 33 sponsors for the financial support that enabled the conference to grow!

• Your friendly neighborhood ROSCon 2017 Organizing Committee

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video

Abstract

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

Slides

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

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

Video

Abstract

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

Slides

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

The OSRF team has put a lot of work into the ROS buildfarm. It's used to provide continuous integration for the open source ROS community. Here he talks about how to both take advantage of the hosted version as well as leverage the components of the system for your own deployment if you wish.

Video

Abstract

The presentation is focused on the Python package ros_buildfarm. The various features provided are being described in detail which will improve the understand of the development process of ROS packages ranging from development and continuous integration over the release process to documentation. It will help you to leverage the provided infrastructure of build.ros.org for the development of your ROS packages and improve your workflow. Additionally it is being demonstrated how the software can be applied locally or e.g. via Travis to run your own "jobs".

Slides

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From Yoonseok Pyo

'ROS National Tour Seminar' in Korea was held on 21-25 August 2017 at Gwangju, Busan, Daegu, Daejeon, Seoul. More than 540 engineers and students were participated in this event that was organized by ROBOTIS CO., LTD. (directed by Dr. Pyo) and GIST, Dong-A University, Kyungpook National University, KAIST, Seoul National University.

This seminar was aimed at beginners of ROS, and we visited five major cities in Korea: Gwangju, Busan, Daegu, Daejeon and Seoul. Each day we spent 5 hours for the seminar, starting with the installation of ROS and learning about the introduction, features and tools. We then learned the concept of ROS based robot programming and tried various ROS development tools. Then we practiced SLAM, Navigation and Manipulation using ROS, TurtleBot3, OpenManipulator (to be announced at ROSCon2017) on the Gazebo simulator. Finally, in celebration of the 10th anniversary of ROS, we went over the ROS history and talked about future ROS development.

It was truly grateful experience that we were able to share a wonderful time talking about ROS with 540 people in a week.

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

To open Day 2 Péter Fankhauser (ETH Zurich) presented how ETH Zurich has been using ROS on they robot ANYmal for the ARGOS Challenge.

Video

Abstract

At the ARGOS Challenge, we participate with our legged robot ANYmal in the autonomous inspection of oil & gas sites. In this presentation, we share our experience with using ROS in our work and introduce our tools, many of which are available open-source. ANYmal is an electrically driven quadrupedal robot, capable of dynamic running, climbing over obstacles, and scaling stairs. It uses onboard laser range sensors to precisely localize and map its surrounding, enabling the autonomous navigation in difficult environments. For ARGOS, ANYmal carries several inspection sensors and uses computer vision to monitor the state of the site.

Slides

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

Video

Abstract

Have you heard of the "ROS-I" or "ROS-M" projects? What about others? As ROS gains acceptance in various commercial markets, ROS-'X' projects seem to organize around them. Such markets include industrial, military, agriculture, aerial, and automotive. An overview of such efforts, some more mature than others, will be presented. The various reasons these projects form will be discussed as well as the impact on the broader ROS community. There is great potential in specialized ROS-'X' projects, but these projects also have great responsibility to ensure that the broader ROS project continues and is well supported.

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

Video

Abstract

FlexGui 4.0 is based upon popular web technologies: HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. This way it is possible to run FlexGUI 4.0 on PC, Android, iPhone, Windows Phone and generally on every device with a modern browser, you will h ave exactly the same user experience on each of them. FlexGui 4.0 communicates using ROS, our choice of middleware for Industry 4.0, IoT. Join the session and let us introduce ourselves, see some of our industrial applications, ask us how could we help you with yours!

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

Here's Levi presenting his work to integrate ROS projects into the QT Creator pipeline.

Video

Abstract

The ROS Qt Creator Plug-in is developed specifically for ROS to increase developers' efficiency by simplifying tasks and creating a centralized location for ROS tools. Since it is built on top of the Qt Creator platform, users have access to all of its existing features like: syntax highlighting, editors (C++, Python, etc.), code completion, version control (Git, Subversion, etc.), debuggers (GDB, CDB, LLDB, etc.), and much more. The talk will cover: a description and motivation; overview of current and future features; and example of how to use the plug-in to manage a ROS Workspace.

Slides

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

Mirko Bordignon (Fraunhofer IPA) Min Ling (ARTC - A*STAR) Shaun Edwards (Southwest Research Institute) present the state of ROS-Industrial as it turns 4 years old and expands to add an Asia-Pacific chapter.

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Abstract

Four years after it was first launched by Shaun Edwards, ROS-Industrial is now a worldwide effort to expand and improve ROS adoption in manufacturing environments and industrial equipment. As an initiative, it is supported financially by OEMs and system integrators, whose interests are represented and requests are collected within three ROS-Industrial Consortia managed by non-profit, applied research institutions. As a software platform, it is developed by a free and open community gathering in monthly meetings and operating through a federated development model, much like the ROS developers community. The talk will showcase real-world examples and current efforts to expand the initiative and to continue addressing technical and non-technical concerns.

Slides

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

In this session Alejandro presents robot_blockly as an approach to make programming robots more accessible.

Video

Abstract

robot_blockly is a ROS package that allows users to create ROS-based algorithms and behaviors, abstracting its complexity using blocks. The aim of the package is to hide the complexity of programming robots via functional blocks. As a rule of thumb, an average PhD student takes 3 weeks to learn ROS. This makes ROS programming not accessible for the great majority. The robot_blockly package aims to simplify the process of using ROS to the point of putting conceptual blocks together.

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

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

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Abstract

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

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

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Abstract

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

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ROSCon 2017

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

At ROSCon 2016 Mukunda gave an overview of how Team Delft took on and won the Amazon Picking Challenge in 2016. The talk provides an overview of the approach the team won, how they leveraged MoveIt, and provides incite into many lessons learned from the experience that can be used by others thinking about similar problems.

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Abstract

This presentation will focus on some of the key MoveIt! practices that we (motion planning team of Team Delft) followed for the Amazon Picking Challenge 2016. Particularly, the following points will be highlighted: 1) making appropriate MoveIt! API choices from a large set of options; 2) difficulties faced such as I/O synchronization with trajectories and collision checking with Octomaps and the corresponding solutions; 3) unsolved problems (mostly with robot driver) while planning around the joint limits of the robot; and 4) general recommendations for OMPL planner configurations with MoveIt!.

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

Looking foward to ROSCon 2017 we're highlighting presentations from last year.

In this session Deanna and William give an update on the state of ROS2 development.

Video

Abstract

This talk will summarize the progress made since the last ROSCon update in 2015. Summary will include the alphas released during that time, changes to supported implementations, and the roadmap. The talk will also include demonstrations of new features and highlights of our experiences while using ROS 2 in demos and benchmarking.

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The ROSCon 2017 call for proposals is currently open as well as registration.

With ROSCon 2017 preparations getting started we wanted to feature some of the presentations from last year. The call for proposals is currently open as well as registration. To start with here's Steffi and Louise's talk about Gazebo, presented ambitiously as a live demo in Gazebo.

Abstract

Gazebo is one of the most used simulators in the ROS community. It has been under heavy development for the past few years and its most recent version, Gazebo 7, comes with myriad new tools and features for new and experienced users alike. Recently, Gazebo development has emphasized user-centered design and improved usability. Updates include not only improved GUI tools and documentation for new folks, but also tools that streamline the workflow for experienced users. We explore new features including: Model Editor, Building Editor, apply force tool, logging and playback, model alignment and snap tools, camera angle controls, plotting, introspection and debugging aids, and more.

Slides

From Lucas Walter via ROS Discourse

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

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

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

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

From OSRF

Michael Ferguson spent a year as a software engineer at Willow Garage, helping rewrite the ROS calibration system, among other projects. In 2013, he co-founded Unbounded Robotics, and is currently the CTO of Fetch Robotics. At Fetch, Michael is one of the primary people responsible for making sure that Fetch's robots reliably fetch things. Mike's ROSCon talk is about how to effectively use ROS as an integral part of your robotics business, including best practices, potential issues to avoid, and how you should handle open source and intellectual property.

Because of how ROS works, much of your software development (commercial or otherwise) is dependent on many external packages. These packages are constantly being changed for the better -- and sometimes for the worse -- at unpredictable intervals that are completely out of your control. Using continuous integration, consisting of systems that can handle automated builds, testing, and deployment, can help you catch new problems as early as possible. Michael also shares that a useful way to avoid new problems is to not immediately switch over to new software as soon as they are available: instead, stick with long-term support releases, such as Ubuntu 14.04 and ROS Indigo.

While the foundation of ROS is built on open source, using ROS doesn't mean that all of the software magic that you create for your robotics company has to be given away for free. ROS supports many different kinds of licenses, some of which your lawyers will be more happy with than others, but there are enough options with enough flexibility that it doesn't have to be an issue. Using Fetch Robotics as an example, Mike discusses what components of ROS his company uses in their commercial products, including ROS Navigation and MoveIt. With these established packages as a base, Fetch was able to quickly put together operational demos, and then iterate on an operating platform by developing custom plugins optimized for their specific use cases.

When considering how to use ROS as part of your company, it's important to look closely at the packages you decide to incorporate, to make sure that they have a friendly license, good documentation, recent updates, built-in tests, and a standardized interface. Keeping track of all of this will make your startup life easier in the long run. As long as you're careful, relying on ROS can make your company more agile, more productive, and ready to make a whole bunch of money off of the future of robotics.

Next up: Ryan Gariepy (Clearpath Robotics)

From OSRF

It's not sexy, but the next big thing for robots is starting to look like warehouse logistics. The potential market is huge, and a number of startups are developing mobile platforms to automate dull and tedious order fulfillment tasks. Transporting products is just one problem worth solving: picking those products off of shelves is another. Magazino is a German startup that's developing a robot called Toru that can grasp individual objects off of warehouse shelves, a particularly tricky task that Magazino is tackling with ROS.

Moritz Tenorth is Head of Software Development at Magazino. In his ROSCon talk, Moritz describes Magazino's Toru as "a mobile pick and place robot that works together with humans in a shared environment," which is exactly what you'd want in an e-commerce warehouse. The reason that picking is a hard problem, as Moritz explains, is perception coupled with dynamic environments and high uncertainty: if you want a robot that can pick a wide range of objects, it needs to be able to flexibly understand and react to its environment; something that robots are notoriously bad at. ROS is particularly well suited to this, since it's easy to intelligently integrate as much sensing as you need into your platform.

Magazino's experience building and deploying their robots has given them a unique perspective on warehouse commercialization with ROS. For example, databases and persistent storage are crucial (as opposed to a focus on runtime), and real-time control turns out to be less important than being able to quickly and easily develop planning algorithms and reducing system complexity. Software components in the ROS ecosystem can vary wildly in quality and upkeep, although ROS-Industrial is working hard to develop code quality metrics. Magazino is also working on remote support and analysis tools, and trying to determine how much communication is required in a multi-robot system, which native ROS isn't very good at.

Even with those (few) constructive criticisms in mind, Magazino says that ROS is a fantastic way to quickly iterate on both software and hardware in parallel, especially when combined with 3D printed prototypes for testing. Most importantly, Magazino feels comfortable with ROS: it has a familiar workflow, versatile build system, flexible development architecture, robust community that makes hiring a cinch, and it's still (somehow) easy to use.

Next up: Michael Ferguson (Fetch Robotics)

From OSRF

Clearpath Robotics is best known for building yellow and black robots that are the research platforms you'd build for yourself; that is, if it wasn't much easier to just get them from Clearpath Robotics. All of their robots run ROS, and Clearpath has been heavily involved in the ROS community for years. Now with Locus Robotics, Tom Moore spent seven months as an autonomy developer at Clearpath. He is the author and maintainer of the robot_localization ROS package, and gave a presentation about it at ROSCon 2015.

robotlocalization is a general purpose state estimation package that's used to give you (and your robot) an accurate sense of where it is and what it's doing, based on input from as many sensors as you want. The more sensors that you're able to use for a state estimate, the better that estimate is going to be, especially if you're dealing with real-worldish things like unreliable GPS or hardware that flakes out on you from time to time. robotlocalization has been specifically designed to be able to handle cases like these, in an easy to use and highly customizable way. It has state estimation in 3D space, gives you per-sensor message control, allows for an unlimited number of sensors (just in case you have 42 IMUs and nothing better to do), and more.

Tom's ROSCon talk takes us through some typical use cases for robot_localization, describes where the package fits in with the ROS navigation stack, explains how to prepare your sensor data, and how to configure estimation nodes for localization. The talk ends with a live(ish) demo, followed by a quick tutorial on how to convert data from your GPS into your robot's world frame.

The robot_localization package is up to date and very well documented, and you can learn more about it on the ROS Wiki.

Next up: Moritz Tenorth, Ulrich Klank, & Nikolas Engelhard (Magazino GmbH)

From OSRF

Matt Vollrath and Wojciech Ziniew work at an ecommerce consultancy called End Point, where they provide support for Liquid Galaxy; a product that's almost as cool as it sounds. Originally an open source project begun by Google engineers on their twenty percent time, Liquid Galaxy is a data visualization system consisting of a collection of large vertical displays that wrap around you horizontally. The displays show an immersive (up to 270°) image that's ideal for data presentations, virtual tours, Google Earth, or anywhere you want a visually engaging environment. Think events, trade shows, offices, museums, galleries, and the like.

Last year, End Point decided to take all of the ad hoc services and protocols that they'd been using to support Liquid Galaxy and move everything over to ROS. The primary reason to do this was ROS support for input devices: you can use just about anything to control a Liquid Galaxy display system, from basic touchscreens to Space Navigator 3D mice to Leap Motions to depth cameras. The modularity of ROS is inherently friendly to all kinds of different hardware.

Check out this week's ROSCon15 video as Matt and Wojciech take a deep dive into their efforts in bringing ROS to bear for these unique environments.

Next up: Tom Moore (Clearpath Robotics)

From OSRF ROS already comes with a fantastic built-in visualization tool called rviz, so why would you want to use anything else? At Southwest Research Institute, Jerry Towler explains how they've created a new visualization tool called Mapviz that's specifically designed for the kind of large-scale outdoor environments necessary for autonomous vehicle development. Specifically, Mapviz is able to integrate all of the sensor data that you need on top of a variety of two-dimensional maps, such as road maps or satellite imagery.

As an autonomous vehicle visualization tool, Mapviz works just like you'd expect that it would, which Jerry demonstrated with several demos at ROSCon. Mapviz shows you a top-down view of where your vehicle is, and tracks it across a basemap that seamlessly pulls image tiles at multiple resolutions from a wide variety of local or networked map servers, including Open MapQuest and Bing Maps. Mapviz is, of course, very plugin-friendly. You can add things like stereo disparity feeds, GPS fixes, odometry, grids, pathing data, image overlays, projected laser scans, markers (including textured markers) from most sensor types, and more. It can't really handle three dimensional data (although it'll do two-and-a-half dimensions via color gradients), but for interactive tracking of your vehicle's navigation and path planning behavior, Mapviz should offer most of what you need.

For a variety of non-technical reasons, SwRI hasn't been able to release all of its tools and plugins as open source quite yet, but they're working on getting approval as fast as they can. They're also in the process of developing even more enhancements for Mapviz, and you can keep up to date with the latest version of the software on GitHub.

Next up: Matt Vollrath & Wojciech Ziniewicz (End Point)

From OSRF

BMW has been working on automated driving for the last decade, steadily implementing more advanced features ranging from emergency stop assistance and autonomous highway driving to fully automated valet parking and 360° collision avoidance. Several of these projects were presented at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show, and as it turns out, the cars were running ROS for both environment detection and planning.

BMW, being BMW, has no problem getting new research hardware. Their latest development platform is the 335I G. This model comes with an advanced driver assistance system based around cameras and radar. The car has been outfitted with four low-profile laser scanners and one long-range radar, but otherwise, it's pretty close (in terms of hardware) to what's available in production BMWs.

Why did BMW choose to move from their internally developed software architecture to ROS? Michael explains how ROS' reputation in the robotics research community prompted his team to give it a try, and they were impressed with its open source nature, distributed architecture, existing selection of software packages, as well as its helpful community. "A large user base means stability and reliability," Michael says, "because somebody else probably already solved the problem you're having." Additionally, using ROS rather than a commercial software platform makes it much easier for BMW to cooperate with universities and research institutions.

Michael discusses the ROS software architecture that BMW is using to do its autonomous car development, and shows how the software interprets the sensor data to identify obstacles and lane markings and do localization and trajectory planning to enable full highway autonomy, based on a combination of lane keeping and dynamic cruise control. BMW also created their own suite of RQT and rviz plugins specifically designed for autonomous vehicle development.

After about two years of experience with ROS, BMW likes a lot of things about it, but Michael and his team do have some constructive criticisms: message transport needs more work (although ROS 2 should help with this), managing configurations for different robots is problematic, and it's difficult to enforce compliance with industry standards like ISO and

Next up: Jerry Towler & Marc Alban (SwRI)

From OSRF

While Intel is best known for making computer processors, the company is also interested in how people interact with all of the computing devices that have Intel inside. In other words, Intel makes brains, but they need senses to enable those brains to understand the world around them. Intel has developed two very small and very cheap 3D cameras (one long range and one short range) called RealSense, with the initial intent of putting them into devices like laptops and tablets for applications such as facial recognition and gesture tracking.

Robots are also in dire need of capable and affordable 3D sensors for navigation and object recognition, and fortunately, Intel understands this, and they've created the RealSense Robotics Innovation Program to help drive innovation using their hardware. Intel itself isn't a robotics company, but as Amit explains in his ROSCon talk, they want to be a part of the robotics future, which is why they prioritized ROS integration for their RealSense cameras.

A RealSense ROS package has been available since 2015, and Intel has been listening to feedback from roboticists and steadily adding more features. The package provides access to the RealSense camera data (RGB, depth, IR, and point cloud), and will eventually include basic computer vision functions (including plane analysis and blob detection) as well as more advanced functions like skeleton tracking, object recognition, and localization and mapping tools.

Intel RealSense 3D camera developer kits are available now, and you can order one for as little as $99.

Next up: Michael Aeberhard, Thomas Kühbeck, Bernhard Seidl, et al. (BMW Group Research and Technology) Check out last week's post: The Descartes Planning Library for Semi-Constrained Cartesian Trajectories

From OSRF

Descartes is a path planning library that's designed to solve the problem of planning with semi-constrained trajectories. Semi-constrained means that the degrees of freedom of the path you need to plan are fewer than the degrees of freedom that your robot has. In other words, when planning a path, there are one or more "free" axes that your robot has to work with that can be moved any which way without disrupting the path. This can open up the planning space if you can utilize them creatively, which traditional robots (especially in the industrial space) usually can't. This results in reduced workspaces and (most dangerous of all) increased reliance on human intuition during the planning process.

Descartes was designed to generate common sense plans, exhibiting similar characteristics to paths planned by a human. It can solve easy problems quickly, and difficult problems eventually, integrating hybrid trajectories and dynamic replanning. It's easy to use, with a GUI that allows you to quickly set anchor points that the robot replans around, with visual confirmation of the new path. The second half of Shaun's ROSCon talk is an in-depth explanation of Descartes' interfaces and implementations intended for path planning fans (you know who you are).

As with many (if not most) of the projects being presented at ROSCon, Descartes is open source, and all of the development is public. If you'd like to try it out, the current stable release runs on ROS Hydro, and a tutorial is available on the ROS Wiki to help you get started.

Next up: Amit Moran & Gila Kamhi (Intel) Check out last week's post: Phobos -- Robot Model Development on Steroids

From OSRF

To model a robot in rviz, you first need to create what's called a Unified Robot Description Format (URDF) file, which is an XML-formatted text file that represents the physical configuration of your robot. Fundamentally, it's not that hard to create a URDF file, but for complex robots, these files tend to be enormously complicated and very tedious to put together. At the University of Bremen, Kai von Szadkowski was tasked with developing a URDF model for a 60 degrees of freedom robot called MANTIS (Multi-legged Manipulation and Locomotion System). Kai got a bit fed up with the process and developed a better way of doing it, called Phobos.

http://robotik.dfki-bremen.de/en/research/robot-systems/mantis.html

Phobos is an add-on for a piece of free and open-source 3D modeling and rendering software called Blender. Using Blender, you can create armatures, which are essentially kinematic skeletons that you can use to animate a 3D character. As it turns out, there are some convenient parallels between URDF models and 3D models in Blender: the links and joints in a URDF file equate to armatures and bones in Blender, and both use similar hierarchical structures to describe their models. Phobos adds a new toolbar to Blender that makes it easy to edit these models by adding links, motors, sensors, and collision geometries. You can also leverage Blender's Python scripting environment to automate as much of the process as you'd like. Additionally, Phobos comes with a sort of "robot dictionary" in Python that manages all of the exporting to URDF for you.

Since the native URDF format can't handle all of the information that can be incorporated into your model in Blender, Kai proposes an extended version of URDF called SMURF (Supplemental Mostly Universal Robot Format) that adds YAML files to a URDF, supporting annotations for sensor, motors, and anything else you'd like to include.

If any of this sounds good to you, it's easy to try it out: Blender is available for free, and Phobos can be found on GitHub.

Dave Coleman has worked in (almost) every robotics lab there is: Willow Garage, JSK Humanoids Lab in Tokyo, Google, UC Boulder, and (of course) OSRF. He's also the owner of PickNik, a ROS consultancy that specializes in training robots to destructively put packages of Oreo cookies on shelves. Dave has been working on MoveIt! since before it was first released, and to kick off the second day of ROSCon, he gave a keynote to share everything he knows about motion planning in ROS.

MoveIt! is a flexible and robot agnostic motion planning framework that integrates manipulation, 3D perception, kinematics, control, and navigation. It's a collaboration between lots of people across many different organizations, and is the third most popular ROS package with a fast-growing community of contributors. It's simple to set up and use, and for beginners, a plugin lets you easily move your robot around in Rviz.

As a MoveIt! pro, Dave offers a series of pro tips on how to get the most out of your motion planner. For example, he suggests that researchers try using C++ classes individually to avoid getting buried in a bunch of layered services and actions. This makes it easier to figure out why your code doesn't work. Dave also describes his experience in the Amazon Picking Challenge, held last year at ICRA in Seattle.

MoveIt! is great, but there's still a lot of potential for improvement. Dave discusses some of the things that he'd like to see, including better reliability (and more communicative failures), grasping support, and, as always, more documentation and better tutorials. A recent MoveIt! community meeting resulted in a future roadmap that focuses on better humanoid kinematic support and support for other types of planners, as well as integrated visual servoing and easy access to calibration packages.

Dave ends with a reminder that progress is important, even if it's often at odds with stability. Breaking changes are sometimes necessary in order to add valuable features to the code. As with much of ROS, MoveIt! depends on the ROS community to keep it capable and relevant. If you're an expert in one of the components that makes MoveIt! so useful, you should definitely consider contributing back with a plug-in from which others can take advantage.

Next up: Mirko Bordignon (Fraunhofer IPA), Shaun Edwards (SwRI), Clay Flannigan (SwRI), et al. Check out last week's post: Real-time Performance in ROS 2

Jackie Kay was upgraded from OSRF intern to full-time software engineer in 2014. Her background includes robotics education and path planning for autonomous lunar rovers. More recently, she's been working on bringing real-time computing to ROS 2.

Real-time computing isn't about computing at a certain speed-- it's about computing on schedule. It means that your system can return data reliably and on time, in situations where responding late is usually bad thing; and sometimes a really bad thing. Hard real-time computing is important in safety critical applications (like nuclear reactors, spacecraft, and autonomous vehicles), when taking too long thinking about something could result in a figurative or literal crash -- or both. Soft real-time computing is a bit more forgiving, in that things running behind have a cost, but the data are still usable, as with packets arriving out of order while streaming video. And in between there's firm real-time computing, where missing deadlines is definitely bad but nothing explodes (or things only explode a little bit), like on a robotic assembly line.

Making a system that's adaptable and reliable, especially in the context of commercialization, often requires real-time computing, and this is why integrating real-time compatibility is one of the primary goals of ROS 2. Jackie's keynote addresses many of the technical details underlying the ROS 2 real-time approach, including scheduling, memory management, node design, and communications strategies. To illustrate the improvements that ROS 2 has over ROS, Jackie shares benchmarking results of a ROS 2 demo running in real-time, showing that even under stress, implementing a high performance soft real-time system in ROS 2 looks promising.

To try real-time computing in ROS 2 for yourself, you can download an Alpha release and play around with a demo here: https://github.com/ros2/ros2/wiki/Real-Time-Programming

ROSCon 2015 Hamburg: Day 1 - Jackie Kay: Real-time Performance in ROS 2 from OSRF on Vimeo.

From OSRF

ROS has been an enormously important resource for the robotics community. It turned eight years old at the end of 2015, and is currently on its ninth official release. As ROS adoption has skyrocketed (especially over the past several years), OSRF, together with the community, have identified many specific areas of the operating system that need major overhauls in order to keep pace with maturing user demand. Dirk Thomas, Esteve Fernandez, and William Woodall from OSRF gave a preview at ROSCon 2015 of what to expect in ROS 2, including multi-robot systems, commercial deployments, microprocessor compatibility, real time control, and additional platform support.

The OSRF team shows off many of the exciting new ROS 2 features in this demo-heavy talk, including distributed message passing through DDS (no ROS master required), performance boosts for communications within nodes, quality of service improvements, and ways of bridging ROS 1 and ROS 2 so that you don't have to make the leap all at once. If you'd like to make the leap all at once anyway, the Alpha 1 release of ROS 2 has been available since last September, and Thomas ends the talk with a brief overview of the roadmap leading up to ROS 2's Alpha 2 release. As of April 2016, ROS 2 is on release Alpha 5 ("Epoxy"), and you can keep up-to-date on the roadmap and release schedule here.

ROSCon 2015 Hamburg: Day 1 - Dirk Thomas: State of ROS 2 - demos and the technology behind from OSRF on Vimeo.

From OSRF

he growing popularity of ROSCon means that it's not always possible to schedule presentations for everyone that wants to give one. In addition, many people have projects that they'd like to share, but don't need a full twenty minutes to present. That's why forty minutes of each day at ROSCon are set aside for any attendee to present anything they want; all in a heartlessly rigid three-minutes-or-less format. Here are a few highlights:

Talk 1 (00:05 -- 02:15) Víctor Mayoral Vilches, Erle Robotics

Victor is the CTO and co-founder of Erle Robotics. The Erle-Brain 2 is an open source, open hardware controller for robots based on the Raspberry Pi 2. It runs ROS, will support ROS 2, and can be used as the brain for all kinds of different robots, including the Erle Spider, a slightly misnamed hexapod that you can buy for €599.

Talk 3 (06:55 -- 10:00): Andreas Bihlmaier, KIT

Andreas works on robot-assisted surgery using ROS at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. KIT has a futuristic operating room full of robots and sensors designed to help human doctors and nurses through positional tracking, augmented reality, and direct robotic assistance. Andreas is also interested in collaborating with people on ROS Medical, which doesn't exist yet but has a really cool logo anyway.

Talk 10 (29:20 -- 31:30) Jochen Sprickerhof, Universitat Osnabrück

Through the efforts of Jochen Sprickerhof and Leopold Avellaneda, there are now ROS packages available upstream in Debian unstable and Ubuntu Xenial that can be installed from the main Debian and Ubuntu repositories. The original ROS packages have been modified to follow Debian guidelines, which includes splitting packages into multiple pieces, changing names in some cases, installing to /usr according to FHS guidelines, and using soversions on shared libraries.

ROSCon 2015 Hamburg: Day 1 - Lightning Talks from OSRF on Vimeo.

From OSRF

The first step in doing something new, useful, and exciting with ROS is -- without exception -- learning how to use ROS. Ralph Seulin is part of CNRS in France, which, along with universities in Spain and Scotland, collaboratively offer a masters course in robotics and computer vision that includes a focus on ROS. Over four semesters, between 30 and 40 students go through the program. In this talk, Seulin discusses how ROS is taught to these students, as well as what kinds of research they leverage that knowledge into.

Before Seulin's group could effectively teach ROS to students, they had to learn ROS for themselves. This was a little bit more difficult way back in 2013 than it is now, but they took advantage of the ROS Wiki , read all the books on ROS they could get ahold of, and of course made sure to attend ROSCon. From there, Seulin developed a series of tutorials for his students, starting with simulations and ending up with practical programming in ROS on the TurtleBot 2. Ultimately, students spend 250 hours on a custom robotics project that integrates motion control, navigation and localization, and computer vision tasks.

Seulin also makes use of ROS in application development. One of those applications is in precision vineyard agriculture because, as Seulin explains, "we come from Burgundy." Using lasers mounted on a tractor to collect and classify 3D data, a prototype robot tractor can be used to analyze vineyard canopies and estimate leaf density. With this information, vineyards can dynamically adjust the application of agricultural chemicals, using just the right amount and only where necessary. Better for plants, better for humans, thanks to ROS.

ROSCon 2015 Hamburg: Day 1 - Ralph Seulin: ROS for education and applied research: practical experiences from OSRF on Vimeo.

From OSRF

Daniel Di Marco is part of Deepfield Robotics, a 20 person agricultural robotics startup within Bosch. Deepfield makes robots that can, among other things, visually locate and then brutally destroy weeds by pounding them into the dirt. In order to deliver software to their customers, Deepfield decided to create its own build farm, and Di Marco's ROSCon presentation explains why managing a build farm internally is a good idea for a startup.

A build farm is a system that can automatically create Debian packages for you, while running integrated unit tests and generating documentation. OSRF already supports all of ROS with its own build farm, so why would anyone want to set up a build farm for themselves instead? Simple, says Di Marco: it's something you should do if you actually want to make money with your robots.

If ROS is a part of your thriving robotics business, running a build farm allows you to do several important things. First, since you're hosting your code on your own servers, you can maintain control over it, protecting your intellectual property and any proprietary components that you may be using. Second, you can use your build farm to distribute your packages directly to your customers, who are (presumably) paying you, and not to just anybody who swings by and wants to snag them. And lastly, you can decide what versions of different packages you want to keep using, rather than being subjected to upgrades that may not work as well.

Di Marco concludes by discussing why Docker is an easy and reliable foundation for a build farm, and how to get it set up. Most of the process has been scripted, thanks to some hard work at OSRF, and Di Marco walks us through an initial deployment to help you get your own build farm up and running.

ROSCon 2015 Hamburg: Day 1 - Daniel Di Marco: Docker-based ROS Build Farm from OSRF on Vimeo.

Originally posted on www.osrfoundation.org

Morgan Quigley is first author of the authoritative 2009 workshop paper on the Robot Operating System. He's been Chief Architect at OSRF since 2012, and in 2013, MIT Tech Review awarded Quigley a prestigious TR35 award. In addition to software development, Quigley knows a thing or two about hardware: he helped Sandia National Labs design high-efficiency bipeds for DARPA, and he also gave Sandia a hand with the development of their sensor-rich, high-DOF robotic hand.

Quigley's ROSCon talk is focused on small (but not tiny) microcontrollers: 32-bit MCUs running at a few hundred megahertz or so, with USB and Ethernet connections. While these types of processors can't power smartphones or run Linux, they are found in many popular embedded systems, such as the Pixhawk PX4 autopilot. Microcontrollers like these would be much easier to integrate if they all operated under a standardized communication protocol, but there are enough inconvenient hoops that have to be jumped through to run ROS on them that it's usually not worth the hassle.

ROS 2, which doesn't rely on a master node and has native UDP message passing, promises to work much better than ROS on distributed embedded systems. To make ROS 2 fit on a small microcontroller, Quigley demonstrates a few applications of FreeRTPS, a portable, embedded-friendly implementation of the network protocol underlying ROS 2.

After showing the impressive results of some torture tests on a Discovery board, Quigley talks about what's coming next, including a focus on even smaller microcontrollers (like Arduino boards that communicate over USB rather than Ethernet). Eventually, Quigley suggests that ROS 2 will be small and light enough to run on the microcontrollers inside sensors and actuators themselves, simplifying real-time control.

ROSCon 2015 Hamburg: Day 1 - Morgan Quigley: ROS 2 on "small" embedded systems from OSRF on Vimeo.

From osrfoundation.org

PX4 is a flight control software stack for autonomous aerial robots that describes itself as "rocket science straight from the best labs, powering anything from racing to cargo drones." One of these labs is at ETH Zurich, where Roman Bapst serves on the faculty. Bapst works on computer vision and actively contributes to the PX4 autopilot platform.

Bapst starts out by describing some of the great things about the PX4 autopilot: it's open source, open hardware, and supported by the Linux Foundation's Dronecode Project, which provides a framework under which developers can contribute to an open source standard platform for drones. PX4 runs on 3DRobotics' Pixhawk hardware, and once you hook up some sensors and servos, it will autonomously pilot nearly anything that flies - from conventional winged aircraft to multicopters to hybrids.

One of PX4's unique features is its modularity, which is fundamentally very similar in structure to ROS. This means that you can run PX4 modules as ROS nodes, while taking advantage of other ROS packages under PX4 to do things like vision based navigation and control. Additionally, it lets you easily simulate PX4-based drones within Gazebo, which, unlike real life, has a free reset button that you can push after a crash.

The PX4 team is currently getting their software modules running as ROS nodes on Qualcomm's Snapdragon Flight drone development platform, which would be a very capable and (affordable) way of getting started with a custom autonomous drone.

ROSCon 2015 Hamburg: Day 1 - Roman Bapst: ROS on DroneCode Systems from OSRF on Vimeo.

What's ROS android_ndk? Why should you care? How does it work? Gary Servín is with Ekumen, an engineering and software consulting company based in Buenos Aires, Argentina that specializes in ROS, web and Android development. With the backing of Qualcomm and OSRF, Ekumen has been trying to make it both possible and easy to run ROS applications on small Android devices like tablets and cellphones using Android's native language development kit.

As Gary explains, the increasing performance, decreasing cost, and overall ubiquity of Android devices make them ideal brains for robots. The tricky part is getting ROS packages to play nice with Android, which is where ROS android_ndk comes in: it's a set of scripts that Ekumen is working on to make the process much easier. Unlike rosjava, ROS android_ndk gives you access to 181 packages from the desktop variant of ROS, with the ability to run native ROS nodes directly.

Ekumen is actively working on this project, with plans to incorporate wrappers for rosjava, actionlib implementation, and support for ROS 2. In the meantime, there's already a set of tutorials on ROS.org that should help you get started.

ROSCon 2015 Hamburg: Day 1 - Gary Servin: ROS android_ndk: What? Why? How? from OSRF on Vimeo.

Stefan's early research using tiny soccer-playing humanoid robots at Technische Universität Darmstadt in Germany prepared him well for software development on much larger humanoid robots that don't play soccer at all. From the Darmstadt Dribblers RoboCup team to the DARPA Robotics Challenge Team ViGIR, Stefan has years of experience with robots that need to walk on two legs and do things while not falling over (much).

Almost all of the software that Team ViGIR used to control its ATLAS robot (named Florian) was ROS based. Stefan credits both the team's prior experience with ROS, ROS's existing software base, and its vibrant community for why Team ViGIR made the choice to go with ROS from the very beginning. Controlling the ATLAS robot is exceedingly complex, and Stefan takes us through the software infrastructure that Team ViGIR used during the DRC; from basic perception to motion planning to manipulation and user interfaces.

With lots of pictures and behind-the-scenes videos, Stefan describes how Team ViGIR planned to tackle the challenging DRC Finals course. The team used both high-level autonomy and low-level control, with an emphasis on dynamic, flexible collaboration between robot and operator. Stefan narrates footage of both of Florian's runs at the DRC Finals; each was eventful, but we won't spoil it for you.

To wrap up his talk, Stephan describes some of the lessons that Team ViGIR learned through their DRC experience: about ROS, about ridiculously complex humanoid robots, and about participating in a global robotics competition.

ROSCon 2015 Hamburg: Day 1 - Stefan Kohlbrecher: An Introduction to Team ViGIR's Open Source Software and DRC Post Mortem from OSRF on Vimeo.

In 2004, Canonical released the first version of Ubuntu, a Debian-based open source Linux OS that provides one of the main operational foundations of ROS. Canonical's founder, Mark Shuttleworth, was CEO of the company until 2009, when he transitioned to a leadership role that lets him focus more on product design and partnerships. In 2002, Mark spent eight days aboard the International Space Station, but that was before the ISS was home to a ROS-powered robot. He currently lives on the Isle of Man with 18 ducks and an occasional sheep. Ubuntu was a platinum co-sponsor of ROSCon 2015, and Mark gave the opening keynote on developing a business in the robot age.

Changes in society and business are both driven by changes in technology, Mark says, encouraging those developing technologies to consider the larger consequences that their work will have, and how those consequences will result in more opportunities. Shuttleworth suggests that robotics developers really need two things at this point: a robust Internet of Things infrastructure, followed by the addition of dynamic mobility that robots represent. However, software is a much more realistic business proposition for a robotics startup, especially if you leverage open source to create a developer community around your product and let others innovate through what you've built.

To illustrate this principle, Mark shows a live demo of a hexapod called Erle-Spider, along with a robust, high-level 'meta' build and packaging tool called Snapcraft. Snapcraft makes it easy for users to install software and for developers to structure and distribute it without having to worry about conflicts or inter-app security. The immediate future promises opportunities for robotics in entertainment and education, Mark says, especially if hardware, ROS, and an app-like economy can come together to give developers easy, reliable ways to bring their creations to market.

ROSCon 2015 Hamburg: Day 1 - Mark Shuttleworth: Commercial models for the robot generation from OSRF on Vimeo.

Cross posted from the OSRF Blog

ROSCon is an annual conference focused on ROS, the Robot Operating System. Every year, hundreds of ROS developers of all skill levels and backgrounds, from industry to academia, come together to teach, learn, and show off their latest projects. ROSCon 2015 was held in Hamburg, Germany. Beginning today and each week thereafter, we'll be highlighting one of the talks presented at ROSCon 2015.

Brian Gerkey (OSRF): Opening Remarks

Brian Gerkey is the CEO of the Open Source Robotics Foundation, which oversees core ROS development and helps to coordinate the efforts of the ROS community. Brian helped found OSRF in 2012, after directing open source development at Willow Garage.

Unless you'd like to re-live the ROSCon Logistics Experience, you can skip to 5:10 in Brian's opening remarks, where he provides an overview of ROSCon attendees and ROS user metrics that shows how diverse the ROS community has become. Brian touches on what's happened with ROS over the last year, along with the future of ROS and OSRF, and what we have to look forward to in 2016. Brian also touches on DARPA's Robotics Fast Track program, which has a submission deadline of January 31, 2016.

ROSCon 2015 Hamburg: Day 1 - Opening Remarks from OSRF on Vimeo.