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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your friendly ROS 2 Team

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

From Discourse

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:

• If you installed Melodic from binaries during the beta, you'll have to remove all of your packages and reinstall them.
• There are currently no debug packages (containing the debug symbols) available for Ubuntu Bionic or Artful packages. This will be remedied a short time after the release, see https://github.com/ros-infrastructure/reprepro-updater/pull/60 for details and the fix.

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

We're excited to announce the availability of the buildfarm for the next distribution of ROS, Lunar Loggerhead!

Current Status of the release: The targeted platforms and minimum requirements are specified in REP-003. As of today 114 packages have been released into Lunar with binaries available for Ubuntu Xenial, Yakkety and Zesty as well as Debian Stretch.

To make the release as convenient as possible for our beloved maintainers, we now have a status page keeping track of which repositories have been released compared to ROS Kinetic. This page allows you to see if your repositories are releasable, it also shows what dependencies are not satisfied (if any) and all the repositories depending on your repositories.

Call for action to all maintainers: Check the status page to see if you can already release your package, if yes, please consider getting a Lunar release out soon, if no, please use the lunar release category to coordinate with the maintainers of packages blocking your releases. Make sure that you have the latest version python-bloom and python-rosdistro before starting your release.

Please record any API changes or major behavioral changes in your package on the Migration wiki page for Lunar.

Once your package has been added to Lunar in rosdistro, you can generate a prerelease command on prerelease.ros.org. Before running the prerelease make sure that python-ros-buildfarm is up to date.

The Lunar release date is May 2017, but it's good to get started early (especially if many packages depend, directly or indirectly, on yours)!

Your friendly ROS Team

Announcement Thread

From Marcel Debout

We developed and released a ROS camera driver for Basler cameras (www.baslerweb.com) under BSD license.

The package supports Baslers mono USB 3.0, GigE as well as the DART cameras. It offers many functions of the Basler-pylon API inside the ROS-Framework. Exposure Time, Gain, Gamma and Brightness values can be adapted via services. Image grabbing is provided continuously via topics or via action interfaces. Furthermore image rectification with the use of the camerainfomanager is supported.

The package can be found on GitHub: https://github.com/magazino/pyloncamera https://github.com/magazino/cameracontrol_msgs

Documentation can be found in the ROS-Wiki: http://wiki.ros.org/pylon_camera

Hope you enjoy!

From P. J. Reed

As hinted yesterday, the real project I have to announce is the Bag Database. This is a server that will scan and monitor an arbitrary directory of bag files, index them, and provide a web-based interface that can be used to quickly search through, analyze, and download them. Have you ever wondered, "Do we have any bags that have a TexturedMarker message in them?", or "What did the path this vehicle followed look like on a satellite terrain map?" This will help you answer both of those questions.

It was designed primarily for internal use; our team has a NAS on which we store thousands of bag files, many of which are several GB in size, and searching through them by hand was difficult and time-consuming. With the Bag Database, everybody can still use tools such as Samba or SFTP to put their bags on the NAS, and the Bag DB will automatically analyze them and make them available in its UI. We have about 15 TB of bags, and it takes about half a second to search through all of them for arbitrary message types or topics.

Features:

• Display any of the information about a bag normally obtained through "rosbag info"
• Quickly search for bags based on their filename, location, contained message types, or published topics
• Filter the visible list of bags based on start and end times, latitude/longitude, size, and more
• Store user-entered metadata such as the vehicle name or description
• Display the bag's path of GPS coordinates on a MapQuest or Bing map
• Use Google's reverse-geocoding API to get a string describing a bag's location from its lat/lon coordinates
• Identify duplicate bag files and tell you about them (although this UI could be better...)

The Bag Database is a Java servlet that only needs a PostgreSQL database to be useful, and it's easiest to deploy it as a Docker container. Source code, documentation, and installation instructions are all available on GitHub: https://github.com/swri-robotics/bag-database

I know it still has a few rough spots I can work out, but I thought now was a good time to go ahead and release it and see how much interest there is.

Feel free to submit any issues or feature requests on GitHub, and let me know if you have any other questions about it.

From Michal Staniaszek via ros-users@

Version 1.8.9 of the diagnostics package (Indigo and later) has some new functionality for the diagnostic aggregator. You can now change the diagnostic aggregator at runtime by dynamically loading or unloading diagnostic analysers. This can be done by including a node in launch file, or directly from code if you require more control. The intention of the change is to give more flexibility to the aggregator, allow individual packages to specify the analysers that they need, and reduce clutter in the diagnostic aggregator GUI.

Please see the tutorial for examples and more information.

From Nikolai Ensslen via ros-users@

Hi all,

in December we released "Subscribing Submarine" an alpha version of rosc, that was announced at last year's ROSCon. For some reason we forgot to mention this here and invite you to review and play around with it. - Hereby I'm catching up on this, and of course also encourage you to join the further development!

rosc is a dependency-free ROS client implementation in ANSI C which aims to support small embedded systems as well as any operating system. Its long-term goal is to become a hardened, efficient and highly portable implementation of the ROS middleware (including future evolutions of it), making it a good choice for use in industrial applications or product development.

Essential features:

• XMLRPC communication
• HTTP/XML parser
• XMLRPC message generator
• Port interface handling (services, topics, XMLRPC)
• ROS message (msg-File) header/source generation
• TCPROS (un-)marshalling

Planned future extensions:

• Transport layer independency
• Realtime capability
• Development debugging features
• Compiler optimization packages
• special size optimizations
• using special pragmas (like pack)
• Multimaster/masterless concept

You can try out the alpha under Linux now. The code is beyond experimental, but not yet mature enough for critical setups.  

In ROS Wiki, see http://wiki.ros.org/rosc

Find the code at https://github.com/synapticon/rosc/releases

Documentation http://synapticon.github.io/rosc/

Have fun,

Nik

Announcement from Armin Hornung, Humanoid Robotics Lab, Uni Freiburg

I'm pleased to announce the release of OctoMap 1.4, along with the updated octomap_mapping ROS stack for electric (see octomap.sf.net/ and ros.org/wiki/octomap_mapping). The updated viewer and visualization library "octovis" is available separately in the octomap_visualization stack.

The main new features since the latest stable 1.2 release are a new generalized IO functionality and file format for octrees, support for per-voxel color information in a specialized tree class (e.g. from the Kinect) and full support for Linux, Mac OS and Windows (the latter still experimental). The API remained mostly unchanged.

• Detailed changelog
• Download OctoMap (stand-alone library and visualization)

Ubuntu packages for ROS electric are being built and will be available in your package manager soon. Until then, you can get the octomap_mapping stack from http://code.google.com/p/alufr-ros-pkg/.

Your friendly neighborhood OctoMap team

We are happy to announce a new release of OMPL, version 0.10. All OMPL users are recommended to update to the new version. It includes the following changes:

• Windows support
• Added a primer on sampling-based motion planning and OMPL.
• Added an implementation of SyCLoP, a new multi-layered meta-planner that combines discrete search with a sampling-based motion planner. Implementations of Syclop with RRT and EST as the low-level planners are provided.
• Added an implementation of EST for planning with controls.
• New generic interface for parameter settings for almost anything that is user-configurable. This was done to simplify reading parameters from an input file (see next bullet).
• New benchmark program that allows one to easily specify benchmark problems with simple configuration files.
• New state spaces for Dubins vehicles and Reeds-Shepp vehicles. This allows one to use any geometric planner to compute feasible paths for such vehicles. See the demo program demo_GeometricCarPlanning.
• Added state serialization, deserialization, state space signatures.
• Added the notion of DirectedControlSampler.
• Added path hybridization, a technique for combining several solutions to a motion planning query to form a better bath. We also introduced a utility class called ParallelPlan that runs several planner instances in parallel and (optionally) uses path hybridization.
• Added a more advanced path shortcutting method.
• Added support for FCL collision checking library. PQP is actually still faster, and is therefore still the default.
• All versions of EST and SBL use the new PDF class to sample more efficiently from empirical probability distribution functions.
• Added a wrapper for boost::numeric::odeint to support high-order numerical integration of ordinary differential equations.
• Added support for multiple solution paths in a Goal datastructure.
• Added StateSpace::getValueAddressAtLocation() to allow faster indexing in states using state space names.

Point your browser to http://ompl.kavrakilab.org/download.html to download the latest version.

Announcement by Thomas Moulard (LAAS) to ros-users

Dear ROS users,

I am pleased to announce the first release of humanoid_walk.

This release provides C++ and ROS interfaces to allow humanoid robot walking trajectories generation.

Humanoid walking algorithms often take a set of footprints as input and provide feet and center of mass trajectories as output. These reference trajectories are then forwarded to the real-time controller.

This stack provides generic interfaces in order to wrap walking generation algorithm into ROS. It also provides an easy to use trajectory generator which can be used to generate motion.

The stack is available here: http://www.ros.org/wiki/humanoidwalk
...and is hosted on GitHub: http://www.github.com/laas/humanoidwalk

Bug reports, comments and patches are welcomed!

Announcement from Thomas Moulard (LAAS) to ros-users

Dear all,

I am pleased to announce the release of the motion_analysis_mocap stack.

This stack aims at integrating data from the Motion Analysis motion capture system into ROS.

This first public release provides a node which retrieve information from Cortex, the software provided by Motion Analysis and publishes them as both ROS topics (geometry_msgs/TransformStamped) and TF transformations.

Patches and feedbacks are welcomed through answers.ros.org or GitHub.

Best,
Thomas Moulard

Announcement by Dominick Vanthienen to ros-users

Dear ROS and OROCOS community,

The Robotics Group of the K.U.Leuven likes to announce the release of the new iTaSC software (iTaSC-2.0alpha). Information, documentation and installation instructions can be found on http://www.orocos.org/itasc . More documentation and example code will be made available in the coming weeks.

Kind regards,

The K.U.Leuven Robotics Group

What is iTaSC?

iTaSC stands for instantaneous Task Specification using Constraints, which is developed at the K.U.Leuven during the past years. The framework generates motions by specifying constraints in geometric, dynamic or sensor-space between the robots and their environment. These motion specifications constrain the relationships between objects (object frames) and their features (feature frames). Established robot motion specification formalisms such as the Operational Space Approach, the Task Function Approach, the Task Frame Formalism, Cartesian Space control, and Joint Space control are special cases of iTaSC and can be specified using the generic iTaSC methodology.

Announcement by Armin Hornung, Humanoid Robots Lab, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg to ros-users

I'm pleased to announce a major update and rewrite of Freiburg's footstep planner in the humanoid_navigation stack, mainly contributed by Johannes Garimort. The planner is now much faster and builds on SBPL. In addition to the previous D* Lite implementation, this now enables anytime planning e.g. with ARA* or AD*.

The ROS interface was largely kept compatible and you can interact with the planner using RViz as planning GUI (instruction on the wiki page). You can check out the humanoid_navigation stack from alufr-ros-pkg.

Best regards,
Armin

Announcement to ros-users by the RoboEarth team

Dear All,

We are happy to announce the RoboEarth ROS stack.

This stack currently allows you to create 3D object models and upload them to RoboEarth. It also provides packages to download any model stored in RoboEarth and detect the described object using a Kinect or an RGB-webcam.

The main packages are:

• re_object_recorder: Allows you to create your own 3D object model using Microsoft's Kinect sensor. By recording and merging point clouds gathered from different angles around the object, a detailed model is created, which may be shared with the world by uploading it to RoboEarth.
• re_kinect_object_detector: Allows you to detect objects you download from RoboEarth using a Kinect.
• re_vision: Allows you to detect objects you download from RoboEarth using a common RGB camera (i.e., no Kinect is required for detection).

For more information, please see the http://www.ros.org/wiki/roboearth or our web site http://www.roboearth.org

Additionally, a demonstration video is available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uMCa-dgtFE

We are looking forward to your feedback.

The RoboEarth Team info@roboearth.org

Announcement from Armin Hornung of Humanoid Robots Lab, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg to ros-users

I'm pleased to announce the release of OctoMap 1.2, along with the updated octomap_mapping ROS stack for diamondback, electric, and unstable (see official octomap page and ROS wiki page). This is major step up from the OctoMap 1.0 release and features many under-the-hood improvements (speedup, leaner code, testing, bug fixes) as well as an improved interface for fellow developers. Key features of the new version are: an adjustable sensor model, node-iterators, time-stamped nodes, and an improved make system. A clean separation of the visualization library means that the octomap_mapping stack no longer depends on Qt or OpenGL (our visualization "octovis" will be released later as an additional ROS package). Furthermore, all output in the octomap package is now using proper ROS log levels (thanks to Eric Perko for the patch).

Detailed changelog

Download OctoMap (stand-alone library and visualization)

ROS packages for diamondback, electric, and unstable are being built and will be available soon. Until then, you can get the `octomap_mapping stack from alufr-ros-pkg

Your friendly neighborhood OctoMap team (Kai and Armin)

Announcement by Ivan Dryanovski of ccny-ros-pkg to ros-users

Hi everyone,

We pushed out new debian releases of the asctec_drivers, mav_tools, and scan_tools stacks, The stacks support diamondback, electric, and unstable.

Here are some highlights of the changes:

scan_tools:

• canonical_scan_matcher has been renamed to laser_scan_matcher;
• laser_scan_matcher now supports multiple sources of predictive input such as imu, odometry, and alpha-beta velocity tracking; can work with laser scans or pcl pointclouds
• laser_ortho_projector behavior significantly changed to match new laser_scan_matcher - check the wiki page for details

asctec_drivers:

• Imu messages published by asctec_proc now take data from the IMUCalcData/acc_*_calib fields (instead of previous incorrect acc_*). The values are measured in different frames of reference; if you are using the /mab/Imu messages, you will need to account for this change.

We also improved the nodelet support in all packages and fixed various bugs reported by the community.

Cheers,

Ivan

Debian packages for ROS Diamondback are now available for Ubuntu Natty Narwhal. We have updated the Diamondback installation instructions so that you can now apt-get install ROS on your new Natty machines. Thanks to all in the community who have helped up upgrade ROS to the latest versions of GCC, Python, and other changes that came with Natty. A special thanks goes to Vincent Rabaud, who did a tremendous effort to get most of the 140+ ROS Diamondback stacks compatible with the latest Ubuntu release.

René Ladan has also updated the FreeBSD packages for ROS to the Diamondback versions, so you can now install the ros, ros_comm, documentation, and rx stacks.

The majority of stacks in ROS Unstable are now also compatible with the Natty release.

A new version of ROS C Turtle has been released. This update includes ROS 1.2.6, support for CCNY's MAV libraries, and several other updates listed below.

• ccny_vision 1.0.0
• linux_networking 0.1.12
• mav_tools 0.1.0
• octomap_mapping 0.2.0
• point_cloud_perception 0.3.2.8
• pr2_calibration 0.5.1
• ros 1.2.6
• wg_hardware_test 0.3.4

The octree-based mapping library OctoMap has just been released as stable version 1.0 . There is now full-blown doxygen documentation available.

Based on OctoMap 1.0, a new version of the octomap_mapping stack was also just released for cturtle, diamondback, and unstable. Debian packages will appear in the Ubuntu ROS repositories soon, diamondback builds should be already available in the shadow-fixed repository for those willing to try them out. New in the octomap_mapping stack is the octomap_ros package to ease the integration of OctoMap with ROS / PCL.

Your friendly neighborhood OctoMap team (Kai and Armin)

Links:

• octomap.sf.net
• octomap for ROS

ROS Diamondback has been released! This newest distribution of ROS gives you more drivers, more libraries, and more 3D processing. We've also worked on making it lighter and more configurable to help you use ROS on smaller platforms.

Install ROS Diamondback

ROS 3D

The Kinect is a game-changer for robotics and is used on ROS robots around the world. ROS is now integrated with OpenNI Kinect/PrimeSense drivers and the Point Cloud Library (PCL) 3D-processing library has a new stable release for Diamondback. The ROS 3D contest entries showed the many creative ways you can integrate the Kinect with your robot, and we will continue to work on making the Kinect easier to use with ROS. We've also redone our C++ APIs to make OpenCV easier-to-use in ROS.

A Growing Community, More Robots

Diamondback is the first ROS distribution release to launch with stacks from the broader ROS community. Thank you to contributors from UT Austin, Uni Freiburg, Bosch, ETH Zurich, KU Leuven, UMD, Care-O-bot, TUM, University of Arizona and CCNY for making their drivers, libraries, and tools available. Many more robots are easier-to-use with ROS thanks to their efforts.

Now that there are over 50 different robots able to use ROS -- mobile manipulators, UAVs, AUVs, and more -- we are providing robot-specific portals to give you the best possible "out of the box" experience. If you have a Roomba, Nao, Care-O-bot, Lego NXT robot, Erratic, miabotPro, or PR2, there are now central pages to help you install and get the most out of ROS. Look for more robots in the coming weeks and months to be added to that list.

Smaller, lighter

We've reorganized ROS itself and broken it into four separate pieces: "ros", "ros_comm", "rx", and "documentation". This enables you to use ROS in both GUI and GUI-less configuration, which will enable you to install ROS on your robot with much smaller footprint. This separation will also assist with porting ROS to other platforms and integrating the ROS packaging system with non-ROS communication frameworks. For more details, see REP 100.

More open

Since ROS C Turtle, we've adopted a new ROS Enhancement Proposal (REP) process to make it easier for you to propose changes to ROS. We have also transitioned ownership of the ROS camera drivers to Jack O'Quin at UT Austin and look forward to enabling more people in the outside community to have greater ownership over the key libraries and tools in ROS. Please see our handoff list to find ways to become more involved as a contributor.

Answers

We launched the ROS Answers several weeks ago to make it easier for you to get in touch with a community of ROS experts. It is quickly becoming the best knowledge base on ROS with over 200 questions in a wide variety of topics.

Other highlights

For more information, please see the Diamondback release notes. Some of the additional highlights include:

• Eigen 3 support, with compatibility for Eigen 2.
• camera1394 now supports nodelets and has been relicensed as LGPL.
• rosjava has been updated and is now maintained by Lorenz Moesenlechner of TUM.
• bond makes it easier to let two ROS nodes monitor each other for termination.
• rosh is a new experimental Python scripting environment for ROS.
• New nodelet-based topic tools
• PointCloud2 support in the ROS navigation stack.

Thanks

From the numerous contributed stacks to patches to bug reports, this release would not have been possible without the help of the ROS community. In particular, we appreciate your help testing and improving the software and documentation for the Diamondback release candidates to make this the best release possible. We hope that Diamondback helps you get more done with your robots, and we look forward to your contributions in future releases.

The third candidate of ROS Diamondback is now available! We intend for this to be our final release candidate, so please report any critical issues that you find. We will be focusing on improving source-based install methods between now and the final release.

This update comes with PCL 0.10, which has the stable API that will be used in PCL 1.0. The ROS 3D contest demonstrated many useful applications of PCL with robotics, and we're excited to have this stable release for Diamondback. We encourage users to provide feedback on tutorials and example applications to help guide PCL to its 1.0 milestone, which we are targeting for the ROS Electric Emy release in August.

Thank you to the many users who have submitted patches and bug reports to help improve these release candidates, including (but not limited to): andrewstraw, mdesnoyer, timn, ryohei, snorri, soetens, nbutko, nevion, willylambert, stevenbellens, isucan, gbiggs, atr, rene, bouffard, dthomas, joq, and lorenz.

ROS Diamondback RC3 Installation Instructions

Major updates:

• ROS 1.4.6
• common 1.4.3
• perception_pcl 0.10

The second candidate of ROS Diamondback is now available! We invite members of the community to test this second release candidate and identify any potential integration issues. We anticipate doing one more release candidate before the official Diamondback release, which is slated for the end of this month.

In addition to several bug fixes, this release also includes stacks from ccny-ros-pkg, including drivers for AscTec quadrotors. We appreciate the efforts of the CCNY Robotics Lab in putting together these releases.

ROS Diamondback RC2 Installation Instructions

New stacks:

• ccny_vision
• asctec_drivers
• mav_tools

Updates

• ROS 1.4.4, 1.4.5
• ros_comm 1.4.2, 1.4.3
• rx 1.4.1
• common 1.4.1
• geometry 1.4.1
• vision_opencv 1.4.1
• PR2: belt compensators are no longer enabled by default

The first release candidate of ROS Diamondback is now available! Thanks to the help from the community, we've been able to make numerous improvements to our Diamondback Beta releases and are now ready to put out our first release candidate.

We have also been putting together new robot-centric API and installation guides, which we hope will help organize the various ROS libraries better for new ROS users. We have setup some example pages and welcome others in the community to do the same:

• Care-O-bot
• Erratic
• NXT
• PR2

Stack contributors: You are now welcome to start releasing against Diamondback directly. We had disabled some stacks in Diamondback due to some integration issues that have now been resolved. You can view the build status to check whether or not your stack is currently included.

Known issues:

• Integration is still on-going for OS X and other Non-Ubuntu platforms.
• Final Diamondback release is awaiting PCL 1.0.

Announcement by Ruben Smits to ros-users

The Orocos Toolchain ROS stack developers are pleased to announce a new release of the orocos_toolchain_ros stack.

Debian packages are already available for unstable, diamondback and cturtle (only for lucid and maverick) will be available soon.

Most important changes:

• We moved the development to GIT: the stack is available here (only http protocol is supported). Since we use git submodules do not forget to use -- recursive if you clone or to issue git submodule init;git submodule update after cloning.

• Integration of RTT/Properties and ROS/Parameters: a new RTT service is available in the rtt_ros_param package that allows RTT users to store component properties on the ROS parameter server or to refresh them using values on the ROS parameter server. The integration also works seamlessly for your complex types as long as a RTT/Typekit for the type exists. Check here for more details.

• The RTT typekit and transportkit generation for messages now creates a single library/typekit/transportkit for each package instead of one for each message type.

• RTT and OCL are now native ROS packages, which allows us to use rosmake directly on the RTT and OCL source.

• OCL offers a orocreate-pkg tool to create a new Orocos package (which uses rosbuild behind the scenes if available) including template code for components, typekits, plugins and services.

• the OCL/deployer can now be used with roslaunch, each deployed process becomes a single node, containing the different deployed components.

• the OCL/deployer now uses rospack in its import functionality, to find new component libraries, services, plugins, typekits and transportkits.

What's still on the roadmap:

• Nicer solution for sequence types in the rosparam integration
• Integration of the RTT/logging with the ROS/logging
• Integration of RTT/Operations and ROS/Services (This one is currently on a hold because the feasibility is still uncertain)

More information:

• Using Orocos/RTT
• orocreate-pkg
• Creating Orocos packages

-- Your friendly Orocos-ROS integration team.

Our second beta release of ROS Diamondback is now available (installation instructions). Thank you to the many users who have reported issues with the first beta release. We also appreciate the users who have updated Diamondback instructions for the many various platforms ROS is available on. A special thank you goes to Nicholas Butko, who provided numerous patches to improve OS X compatibility.

In addition to OS X updates, this release continues our rollout of Eigen 2/3 compatibility and also cleans up various stack dependencies and installation variants. There are still several fixes and updates we wish to deploy before we reach release candidate status.

Install ROS Diamondback Beta

A beta release of ROS Diamondback is now available (installation instructions). We encourage users to try this beta release out and report any issues. We also encourage users who were using "unstable" to switch to Diamondback at this time as they are equivalent. We expect a very short beta period before our first release candidate.

The release of Diamondback is currently delayed due to integration of Eigen 3. Eigen 3 has become an important library in the robotics community, but it was originally incompatible with Eigen 2. The Eigen developers have been very responsive in introducing backwards compatibility modes, and we've determined that it would be better integrate with the updated library than to attempt to implement custom workarounds.

We still anticipate releasing Diamondback release this month, but we need your help to test Diamondback early and often, especially our Eigen integration. We also request the help of our OS X/Arch/Fedora/Gentoo/OpenSUSE/Slackware community to test integration and installation instructions for those platforms.

Install ROS Diamondback Beta

ROS C Turtle has been updated with new debian packages. This update is mainly to include compatibility with image_transport_plugins on Ubuntu Maverick.

Changes:

• client_rosjava 0.1.3
• cob_common 0.1.0
• image_transport_plugins 0.3.2
• simulator_stage 1.2.3
• web_interface 0.4.4
• wg_hardware_test 0.3.2

A new update to C Turtle has been released. This new release contains the first release of the erratic_robot stack, which supports the Videre Erratic platform. This stack is now maintained by Antons Rebguns/ua-ros-pkg and includes drivers, robot description, and navigation configuration.

• camera_drivers 1.2.7
• common_tutorials 0.1.2
• erratic_robot 0.1.0
• linux_networking 0.1.7
• pr2_simulator 1.2.3

A new release of debian packages is out. We have updated our debian-building infrastructure in preparation for ROS Diamondback, so please report any issues to ros-users.

• common 1.2.2
• executive_smach 1.0.0
• point_cloud_perception 0.3.2.7
• pr2_common 1.2.3
• pr2_controllers 1.2.6
• pr2_self_test 0.3.1
• robot_model 1.2.4

This is a minor update mainly to deal with integration issues with PCL and Eigen.

• client_rosjava 0.1.2
• diagnostics 1.2.5
• geometry_experimental 0.1.3
• physics_ode 1.2.8
• point_cloud_perception 0.3.2.6
• pr2_self_test 0.3.0
• simulator_gazebo 1.2.8
• vslam 0.1.7

This newest update of C Turtle now lets you get the various stacks necessary for running or simulating Fraunhofer IPA's Care-O-bot 3. PR2 and Care-O-bot have shared a dance together, and Care-O-bot is waving the Jolly Roger in the C Turtle poster, so we're excited to have the five Care-O-bot stacks join the official distribution. You can find out more on the care-o-bot wiki page.

This is also the first release of the experimental rosjava client for ROS. The existing client has been taken over by Lorenz Moesenlechner at TUM and has been updated to work with the upcoming Diamondback release.

Updates:

• art_vehicle 0.3.2
• camera_drivers 1.2.6
• client_rosjava 0.1.1
• cob_apps 0.0.1
• cob_common 0.0.1
• cob_driver 0.0.1
• cob_extern 0.0.1
• cob_simulation 0.0.1
• geometry_experimental 0.1.2
• point_cloud_perception 0.3.2.5
• ros_applications 0.1.0
• slam_gmapping 1.2.2

Our latest C Turtle update has octomap_mapping and freiburg_tools stacks from the University of Freiburg (alufr-ros-pkg). We have also updated the kinect stack to include the latest calibration code and our kinect calibration tutorials has more instructions.

• continuous_ops 0.1.0
• driver_common 1.2.3
• joystick_drivers 1.2.2
• kinect 0.1.6
• linux_networking 0.1.6
• motion_planners 0.2.8
• motion_planning_common 0.2.7
• navigation_experimental 0.1.4
• octomap_mapping 0.1.2
• freiburg_tools 0.1.2
• point_cloud_perception 0.3.2.3
• pr2_common 1.2.2
• pr2_navigation 0.1.5
• pr2_plugs 0.3.11
• pr2_web_apps 0.3.11
• ros_release 0.1.7
• simulator_stage 1.2.2
• slam_gmapping 1.2.1
• web_interface 0.4.3
• visualization 1.2.1

Announcement from Stefan Holzer

Hi all,

We've been working very hard to get PCL to work in Windows for the past few days and we are happy to announce the release of PCL 0.6! Because one of our friends and colleagues is turning 30 tomorrow, we decided to dedicate this release to him. Happy Birthday Bastian!

The 0.6 release brings:

• preliminary Windows support
• FLANN 1.6.2
• Cminpack 1.1.0
• portability fixes for MacOS
• functionality patches and bug-fixes

Complete change-list

Thanks to all the contributors!

With this release, the core PCL libraries (dependencies and ROS wrappers) moved to the perception_pcl stack, while the visualization tools and tutorials moved to the perception_pcl_addons stack. No further development of PCL will be done in the old point_cloud_perception stack.

PS. Remember to bookmark http://www.pointclouds.org :)

Cheers,
Stefan

Announcement from Armin Hornung of Albert-Ludwigs-Universität

The OctoMap 3D mapping library is now available as precompiled .deb package for Ubuntu in the ROS cturtle and unstable repositories. The octomap_mapping stack contains the actual octomap package for ROS and a map server. Detailed API documentation is available at the wiki page under "Code API".

This coincides with the release of OctoMap v0.8, which the octomap_mapping stack now builds on. Compared to previous versions, the optimizations in OctoMap 0.8 significantly speed up map building and queries on the map. As always, we're curious to hear how you use OctoMap and if there are suggestions for further improvements.

Best regards,
Armin Hornung and Kai M. Wurm

Just in the time for Thanksgiving, we've got some new things for the ROS and ROS-Kinect community to play with.

• Access to Kinect's raw IR image
• Kinect debians for C Turtle
• ROS debians for Ubuntu Maverick on C Turtle

For the Kinect, we've achieved a major breakthrough: access to the IR camera image. Now that we have access to the raw IR camera image, instead of just the depth image, we can do monocular and stereo calibration using the regular ROS calibration tools and methods. We're taking a short break for Thanksgiving, but we should have RGB/depth calibration by the end of the week.

Regularly ROS-Kinect users can just update to the get these changes -- or you can try

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ros-cturtle-kinect

We have a lot more in the works, so stay tuned. Happy Thanksgiving!

TheCorpora has put out their own Linux distribution, based on Ubuntu 10.04, that neatly packages everything you need to get up and running with Qbo. It comes with ROS, OpenCV, Festival speech synthesis, Julius speech recognition, Qbo-specific libraries, and more. This includes capabilities, like Qbo_Visual_Slam, shown below:

In this latest C Turtle update, we are now including two stacks from utexas-art-ros-pkg: art_vehicle and velodyne.

• art_vehicle 0.3.1
• velodyne 0.2.0

Other updates:

• camera_drivers 1.2.5
• driver_common 1.2.2
• joystick_drivers 1.2.1
• motion_planning_common 0.2.5
• pr2_ethercat_drivers 1.2.4
• ros_realtime 0.4.2

A new C Turtle Update has been released. This update is significant in that we have the first externally managed ROS stack available for download: orocos_toolchain_ros. This stack, produced by kul-ros-pkg, provides integration between ROS and the Orocos software framework.

We also have several stacks related to Diamondback. roshpit allows users to download and test the upcoming rosh shell, which will officially debut in ROS 1.4. There are also new empty ros_comm and rx stacks, which have been added so that stacks can be compatible with both C Turtle and Diamondback packaging, once the "ros" stack has been split.

General Updates:

• ros 1.2.4
• camera_drivers 1.2.4
• diagnostics 1.2.3
• driver_common 1.2.1
• executive_smach 0.4.1
• graph_mapping 0.1.3
• image_pipeline 1.2.2
• image_transport_plugins 0.3.1
• linux_networking 0.1.5
• motion_planners 0.2.6
• orocos_toolchain_ros 0.1.6
• robot_calibration 0.3.1
• robot_model 1.2.3
• simulator_gazebo 1.2.5
• slam_karto 0.1.6
• vision_opencv 1.2.5
• vslam 0.1.6

Diamondback-compatibility Updates:

• roshpit 0.2.0
• ros_comm 0.0.1
• rx 0.0.1

PR2 and WG Updates:

• cart_pushing 0.1.0
• pr2_calibration 0.5.0
• pr2_ethercat_drivers 1.2.3
• pr2_mechanism 1.2.2
• pr2_power_drivers 1.0.8
• pr2_robot 1.0.5
• pr2_self_test 0.2.0
• wg_common 0.1.3
• wg_pr2_apps 0.1.2

ROS 1.3.0 has been released. This is an unstable release and is the first of the 1.3.x "odd-cycle" releases. During this release cycle, we expect to rapidly integrate new features and the stack is expected to be volatile.

In particular, much of the work for the ROS 1.3.x release cycle is related to REP 100, ROS Stack Separation. There are several major changes in this initial release, with more to come. For ROS 1.3.0, we have implemented the following changes:

• genmsg_cpp has been deleted. This ends support for the current experimental rosoct and rosjava libraries.
• All rx* packages have been moved to the rx stack. This was done to remove heavyweight WxWindows dependencies from the ROS stack.
• rosdoc has been moved to the new documentation stack. This was done to remove heavyweight Doxygen, Epydoc, and Sphinx dependencies from the ROS stack.

The next major change will be to migrate the ROS middleware libraries to the ros_comm stack. This will mainly have impact on stack dependency declarations.

We've also included deprecation warnings in the rosrecord and rosbagmigration packages for this release. Use of these APIs should be ported to the new rosbag library, which has support for the latest bag format.

For more changes, please the ROS 1.3.0 changelist.

Also, you may wish to now consult the rx and documentation stack changelists for packages that were formerly in the ROS stack.

For more information on the ROS 1.3.x releases, you can see REP 101, ROS 1.4 Release Schedule.

Rene Ladan has been working hard over the past several months providing patches to ROS in order to improve FreeBSD compatibility. Now he's announced the first FreeBSD package for ROS, which makes installation patch-free and no-hassle.

Hi,

The first FreeBSD package for ROS is now available, providing the equivalent of ros-cturtle-ros on Ubuntu (but without the build directories). The cleaned up instructions are available at the wiki.

Thanks go to the ROS developers for applying all the patches I sent to them.

I will probably add more ROS packages in the future, starting with the tutorials and the Lego NXT stacks (the latter because that's the only robot I have myself, apart from some webcams).

Regards,
Rene

http://www.rene-ladan.nl/

Steven Bellens and Koen Buys from kul-ros-pkg have announced a new camera_pose_estimation stack

We've put a first version of our camera_pose_estimation stack online, available in the kul-ros-pkg repository.

The stack builds upon the ar_pose package, but allows tracking markers with multiple cameras taking into account measurement uncertainty as provided in the ARMarker message, as opposed to the ar_pose package which allows tracking one / multiple markers with a single camera. All available estimates are converted to world coordinates and fused using an Extended Kalman Filter as provided in BFL. If you have any suggestions/comments/questions about the stack, let us know!

best regards,

Steven Bellens
Koen Buys

Link

On the heels of the Orocos RTT 2.0 release, Ruben Smits from KU Leuven has announced the first version of the new-and-improved Orocos/ROS integration

Hi orocos-dev, orocos-users, ros-users,

A first version of our Orocos/ROS integration is ready in the form of the orocostoolchainros stack.

The stack is available at:

• released version:
  • tarball
  • svn: svn co http://svn.mech.kuleuven.be/repos/orocos/trunk/kul-ros-pkg/stacks/orocos_toolchain_ros/tags/orocos_toolchain_ros-0.1.0 orocos_toolchain_ros
• developers version: svn co http://svn.mech.kuleuven.be/repos/orocos/trunk/kul-ros-pkg/stacks/orocos_toolchain_ros/trunk orocos_toolchain_ros

The stack contains all of the Orocos Toolchain v2.0.1 except for the autoproj build system. The orocos_toolchain_ros stack contains patched versions of orogen and utilmm to automatically create ros packages instead of autoproj packages for the automatic typekit generation for c++ classes.

On top of the Orocos Toolchain v2.0 this stack contains:

• rtt_ros_integration: This package contains the following:
  • The ros-plugin: this RTT plugin allows Orocos/RTT components to contact the ROS master
  • CMake macro's to automatically create Orocos/RTT typekits and transport plugins from .msg files
• rtt_ros_integration_std_msgs: This package shows how the CMake macro's have to be used, it creates the Orocos/RTT typekits and transport plugins for all roslib and std_msgs messages
• rtt_ros_integration_example: This package shows how the rtt_ros_integration should be used from an Orocos/RTT user/developer point of view. It contains a HelloRobot component which can be contacted using rostopic echo

And last but not least the stack also includes the rtt_exercises package for Orocos/RTT new-commers.

The orocos_toolchain_ros stack itself still remains undocumented, I'm currently working on that, but documentation on the Orocos Toolchain can be found via: http://http://www.orocos.org/wiki/orocos/toolchain.

If anyone has any questions please do not hesitate to contact the orocos-users, orocos-dev or ros-users mailing list.
Ruben

ROS C Turtle Update 1 has been released. The list of updates includes:

• pr2_tabletop_manipulation_apps 0.2.1
• point_cloud_perception 0.2.8
• topological_navigation 0.1.2
• simulator_gazebo 1.2.3
• pr2_simulator 1.2.1
• sql_database 0.2.1
• pr2_object_manipulation 0.2.1
• physics_ode 1.2.2
• object_manipulation 0.2.2
• tabletop_object_perception 0.2.1

We are happy to announce the release of a number of stacks that provide core functionality for grasping and manipulation tasks, as well as example applications on the PR2 robot. These include:

• object_manipulation
• pr2_object_manipulation
• tabletop_object_perception
• pr2_tabletop_manipulation_apps

Additional details, tutorials and example application can be found on the ROS Wiki. Good places to start checking out the available functionality are:

• object_manipulation (for core, robot-independent functionality)
• pr2_tabletop_manipulation_apps (for applications, demos and tutorials on the PR2 robot).

Complementing the manipulation stacks is a database of household objects containing information relevant for manipulation tasks, along with its ROS interface. Details can be found on the household_objects_database page.

Please note that these are "research stacks", under active development. While we have put a lot of effort into reviewing and documenting them, they are likely to be less stable than "core" ROS stacks which have reached 1.x releases. That said, we believe that they will provide useful functionality for building towards complex mobile manipulation applications.

Any feedback, bug reports or success stories of using these stacks will be greatly appreciated.

Best,
Your Merry ROS Manipulation Mob

ROS C Turtle has been released!

ROS C Turtle is the second ROS distribution release. ROS Box Turtle was released March 2, 2010 and included stable releases of ROS and core libraries and tools like navigation, rviz, hardware drivers, and an image-processing pipeline.

ROS C Turtle builds on Box Turtle with across-the-board improvements to these core libraries and numerous bug fixes. These improvements include a new "nodelet" architecture that provides low-latency, zero-copy message passing within C++ nodes, official support for a Lisp client library, and an official firewire camera driver (thanks to Jack O'Quin). Numerous third-party libraries have been upgraded in this release, including Stage 3.2.2, Bullet 2.76, and Eigen 2.0.15, as well as newer versions of KDL and Gazebo. There are many, many other improvements listed in the change list.

This release includes new experimental libraries for 3D perception, manipulation, grasping, and visual odometry. We encourage early adopters to test out these libraries and provide feedback so that they can be stabilized for future ROS releases.

Since the release of Box Turtle, the ROS community has grown immensely. There are over a dozen new public, open-source repositories of ROS code, and ROS has been ported to a variety of different robot platforms, from mobile manipulators to autonomous boats. Commercial robotics software libraries like Urbi and Karto now have open-source offerings that are compatible with ROS, and the list of robot platforms that can be used with ROS continues to grow. We're excited at these new opportunities to collaborate within the community and hope that you all enjoy this C Turtle release.

ROS distribution releases occur on a six-month cycle. The successor to C Turtle, Diamondback, is expected in February of 2011.

ROS C Turtle Release Candidate 2 has been released, including ROS 1.2.0. All of the remaining stacks have also reached stable release, including geometry and pr2_ethercat_drivers. This bug also fixes a major problem with calibration of the PR2 grippers.

ROS 1.2.0 includes major updates to roscpp, roslaunch, and rosbag, as well as improvements to nearly every tool in the ROS toolchain. roslisp is now included as a supported client library. roslisp users should also install the roslisp_support stack. For a more complete list of changes, see the ROS 1.2.0 change list.

NOTE: Debian packages are currently building and will be available soon. The new debian packages have a "version 23" suffix, e.g. ros-cturtle-ros_1.2.0-23.

• ROS 1.2.0
• executive_python 0.3.0
• geometry 1.2.0
• pr2_controllers 1.2.5
• pr2_ethercat_drivers 1.2.0
• pr2_plugs 0.3.3
• pr2_doors 0.3.6
• vslam 0.1.5

Change lists

• ROS
• executive_python
• geometry
• pr2_controllers
• pr2_ethercat_drivers
• pr2_plugs
• pr2_doors
• vslam

EusLisp is now open source with a BSD license! There are over two decades of robotics research built on top of EusLisp that can now more easily be shared with other researchers. All of this is accessible to ROS users as well: the JSK lab at Tokyo University has developed a roseus package that enables use of ROS within a EusLisp environment. Many robots, including the Kawada HRP-2, Aibo, Nao, and Willow Garage PR2 are compatible with EusLisp.

EusLisp is a Lisp-based programming environment for developing robotics programs. It combines a solid modeler, visualization, geometric libraries, simulation and more into a single development environment. EusLisp was originally developed by Toshihiro Matsui at AIST in 1986 and has been heavily used by the JSK Lab at Tokyo University in their humanoid robotics research.

EusLisp is an integrated programming system for the research on intelligent robots based on Common Lisp and Object-Oriented programming. The principal subjects in the field of robotics research are sensory data processing, visual environment recognition, collision avoiding motion planning, and task planning. In either problem, three dimensional shape models of robots and environment play crucial roles. A motivation to the development of EusLisp was a demand for an extensible solid modeler that can easily be made use of from higher level symbolic processing system. Investigations into traditional solid modelers proved that the vital requirement for their implementation language was the list processing capability to represent and manage topology among model components. Numerical computation power was also important, but locality of geometric computation suggested the provision of vector/matrix functions as built-ins would greatly ease programming.

From EusLisp Manual, Part I, EusLisp Basics, 1. Introduction

You can find out more about the open source Euslisp at EusLisp.sourceforge.net, and you can download the code here.

ROS C Turtle Release Candidate 1 has been released. With this release, nearly all of the remaining ROS stacks have reached stable release: camera_drivers, common, common_msgs, driver_common, imu_drivers, joystick_drivers, laser_drivers, pr2_simulator, sound_drivers, visualization, visualization_common. This release also includes ROS 1.1.16, which is a minor update and is the release candidate for ROS 1.2.

As this is our release candidate for C Turtle, we encourage users to try this release out and note any issues they have with this release. You can consult our release notes that we are currently assembling to assist with any integration issues.

NOTE: Debian packages are currently building and will be available soon. The new debian packages have a "version 21" suffix, e.g. ros-cturtle-ros_1.1.16-21.

• ROS 1.1.16
• camera_drivers 1.2.0
• common 1.2.0
• common_msgs 1.2.0
• driver_common 1.2.0
• imu_drivers 1.2.0
• joystick_drivers 1.2.0
• joystick_drivers_tutorials 1.2.0
• laser_drivers 1.2.0
• point_cloud_perception 0.2.0
• pr2_simulator 1.2.0
• simulator_gazebo 1.2.1
• sound_drivers 1.2.0
• visualization 1.2.0
• visualization_common 1.2.0

Change lists

• ROS
• camera_drivers
• common
• common_msgs
• driver_common
• imu_drivers
• joystick_drivers
• joystick_drivers_tutorials
• laser_drivers
• point_cloud_perception
• pr2_simulator
• simulator_gazebo
• sound_drivers
• visualization
• visualization_common

Anton Rebguns of the University of Arizona has announced the release of a Videre Stereo Camera driver. NOTE: this package only works with ROS C Turtle. The announcement is below.

I'd like to announce an initial release of a driver for Videre Stereo cameras. The driver supports both STOC and non-STOC devices. Pretty much all settings can be controlled through the dynamic_reconfigure GUI, these include:

• TF Frame
• Processing Mode (for STOC devices)
• Generic camera parameters (exposure, gain, brightness)
• Stereo Processing parameters (uniqueness, texture thresholds, speckle size and range)

There are a few parameters that are present but don't currently work, like whitebalance and horopter settings. There are no tutorials yet, if people are using it and have problems just shoot me an email. I will be adding some documentation/tutorials fairly soon.

• Download location (ua-ros-pkg): ua_drivers stack, videre_stereo_cam package.
• Wiki page

Thanks, Anton

ROS C Turtle Alpha 6 has been released. This update includes ROS 1.1.15. Many new stacks reached stable release: image_common, image_pipeline, physics_ode, pr2_common, simulator_gazebo, and simulator_stage. We are getting close to our release candidate for the actual C Turtle release. As we approach this release candidate, we anticipate more rapid releases to quickly verify final code changes going into the system.

In addition to the new stable releases, several new unstable/research stacks are being included with this release, including vslam, slam_karto and graph_mapping.

NOTE: Debian packages are still building and will be available soon. The new debian packages have a "version 18" suffix, e.g. ros-cturtle-ros_1.1.15-18.

• ROS 1.1.15
• common 1.1.11
• common_msgs 1.1.5
• graph_mapping 0.1.0
• image_common 1.2.0
• image_pipeline 1.2.0
• robot_model 1.2.2
• physics_ode 1.2.0
• pr2_mechanism 1.2.0
• pr2_common 1.2.0
• pr2_common_actions 0.3.0
• pr2_controllers 1.2.4
• pr2_doors 0.3.5
• pr2_ethercat_drivers 1.1.6
• pr2_mechanism 1.2.1
• pr2_plugs 0.3.2
• pr2_robot 1.0.2
• robot_calibration 0.3.0
• simulator_gazebo 1.2.0
• simulator_stage 1.2.0
• slam_gmapping 1.2.0
• slam_karto 0.1.0
• vision_opencv 1.0.4
• vslam 0.1.4

Change lists

• ROS
• common
• common_msgs
• graph_mapping
• image_common
• image_pipeline
• robot_model
• physics_ode
• pr2_mechanism
• pr2_common
• pr2_common_actions
• pr2_controllers
• pr2_doors
• pr2_ethercat_drivers
• pr2_mechanism
• pr2_plugs
• pr2_robot
• robot_calibration
• simulator_gazebo
• simulator_stage
• slam_gmapping
• slam_karto
• vision_opencv
• vslam

Thanks to the efforts of Gostai, Urbi and ROS are now compatible! Urbi 2.1 has just been released, and this new release includes integration with ROS and Urbiscript.

For ROS users, Urbiscript provides users a powerful scripting environment that provides features like parallelism and event-triggers for creating behavior scripts for your robots. ROS users can also use the Gostai Studio Suite, which provides a graphical IDE. Gostai has released the Urbi kernel as open source (AGPL), which contributes the growing community of open-source platform technologies for robotics.

For Urbi users, ROS provides a quickly growing library of reusable and open-source software components with a wide range of capabilities, including navigation, perception, and manipulation.

To find out more about Urbi open source, check out Urbi Forge. To get started with Urbi + ROS, you can read the Urbi manual or try their Urbi + ROS tutorial.

ROS C Turtle Alpha 5 has been released. This update is mainly to fix an issue with rxgraph and includes ROS 1.1.14. We are also now including ros_tutorials with the base distribution of C Turtle to simplify installation, and we are also testing builds of several new research stacks, including people, sql_database, object_manipulation, pr2_object_manipulation, tabletop_object_perception, pr2_tabletop_manipulation_apps. These research stacks are unstable and must be installed separately.

NOTE: Debian packages are still building and will be available soon. The new debian packages have a "version 15" suffix, e.g. ros-cturtle-ros_1.1.14-15.

• ros 1.1.14
• common 1.1.10
• geometry 1.1.8
• pr2_common 1.1.3
• pr2_controllers 1.2.3
• ros_tutorials 0.2.0
• pr2_simulator 1.1.3
• simulator_gazebo 1.1.12
• people 0.1.0
• sql_database 0.1.1
• object_manipulation 0.1.0
• pr2_object_manipulation 0.1.0
• pr2_tabletop_manipulation 0.1.0
• tabletop_object_perception 0.1.0

Change lists

• ros
• common
• geometry
• pr2_common
• pr2_controllers
• ros_tutorials
• pr2_simulator
• simulator_gazebo
• people
• sql_database
• object_manipulation
• pr2_object_manipulation
• pr2_tabletop_manipulation
• tabletop_object_perception

ROS C Turtle Alpha 4 has been released. This update contains ROS 1.1.13, which contains important bug fixes for roscpp as well as for the relay node in topic_tools.

Two stacks have reached stable status with this release: navigation and diagnostics. They now have 1.2.x version numbers to indicate that they are now part of a stable update series (patch-only).

NOTE: The new debian packages have a "version 12" suffix, e.g. ros-cturtle-ros_1.1.13-12.

• ros 1.1.13
• common 1.1.9
• diagnostics 1.2.0
• navigation 1.2.0
• pr2_apps 0.2.3
• pr2_common_actions 0.2.2
• pr2_mechanism 1.1.3
• pr2_simulator 1.1.2
• robot_model 1.2.1
• ros_realtime 0.4.1
• simulator_gazebo 1.1.10
• visualization 1.1.2
• visualization_common 1.1.2

Change lists

• ros
• common
• diagnostics
• navigation
• pr2_apps
• pr2_common_actions
• pr2_mechanism
• pr2_simulator
• robot_model
• ros_realtime
• simulator_gazebo
• visualization
• visualization_common

C Turtle Alpha 3 has been released. This update includes numerous bug fixes, including a new ROS 1.1.12 release. This release also contains stable releases for robot_model and pr2_robot. If you are running a previous C Turtle release, we encourage you to update and report any issues that you find.

NOTE: The new debian packages have a "version 11" suffix, e.g. ros-cturtle-ros_1.1.12-11. We are currently having issues with Karmic 64-bit binaries, but other Ubuntu binaries should be available.

• ros 1.1.12
• camera_drivers 1.1.4
• common 1.1.8
• geometry 1.1.7
• joystick_drivers 1.1.2
• pr2_common 1.1.2
• pr2_mechanism 1.1.1
• pr2_robot 1.0.1
• pr2_simulator 1.1.1
• robot_model 1.2.0
• roslisp_support 0.2.5
• simulator_gazebo 1.1.8
• executive_python 0.2.0
• pr2_common_actions 0.2.0
• pr2_doors 0.3.3
• pr2_calibration 0.4.3
• pr2_plugs 0.3.1
• topological_navigation 0.1.1
• web_interface 0.4.1

Change lists

• ros
• camera_drivers
• common
• geometry
• joystick_drivers
• pr2_common
• pr2_mechanism
• pr2_robot
• pr2_simulator
• robot_model
• roslisp_support
• simulator_gazebo
• executive_python
• pr2_common_actions
• pr2_doors
• pr2_calibration
• pr2_plugs
• topological_navigation
• web_interface
• camera_drivers
• joystick_drivers

C Turtle Alpha 2 has been released. This update includes numerous bug fixes, including a new ROS 1.1.10 release. This updates fixes bug reports with Gazebo permissions issues, ros::Time issues, tf, Lucid 32-bit binary packages, and more. We appreciate the efforts of the community to make C Turtle as stable as possible -- please keep those reports coming!

NOTE: The new debian packages have a "version 8" suffix, e.g. ros-cturtle-ros_1.1.10-8. They should finish building shortly.

• ROS 1.1.10
• camera_drivers 1.1.2
• geometry 1.1.6
• pr2_robot 1.0.0
• pr2_common 1.1.0
• pr2_power_drivers 1.0.6
• ros_realtime 0.3.1
• simulator_gazebo 1.1.7

Box Turtle updates:

• camera_drivers 1.0.4
• driver_common 1.0.4
• geometry 1.0.3
• pr2_ethercat_drivers 1.0.6

Change lists

• camera_drivers
• driver_common
• geometry
• pr2_robot
• pr2_common
• pr2_ethercat_drivers
• pr2_power_drivers
• ros_realtime
• simulator_gazebo

ROS C Turtle Alpha 1 is now available for developers. The is an alpha release of the upcoming distribution that is being used to test the integration of the many new features and components that will be released with C Turtle. C Turtle is intended to be backwards compatible with Box Turtle, though many APIs that were deprecated in Box Turtle have been removed. This early release will allow developers to test compatibility.

Debian packages are available for this release, including binary builds for Ubuntu Lucid Lynx. Any of the current ROS installation instructions will work for C Turtle by simply substitution "cturtle" for "boxturtle". You can also use the SVN externals URLs that we have setup for each variant.

As this is an alpha release, we ask that developers who use it provide as much feedback as possible, including filing bug tickets for any issues found.

ROS 1.1.8 has been released. This is the feature freeze release of ROS. Future releases in the ROS 1.1.x series will be bug-fix only, and ROS 1.2 will be based on the features and APIs of this release. Now that ROS is feature frozen, we encourage developers to test integration with ROS 1.1.8 and report any problems you find. This release should be backwards-compatible with ROS 1.0, though we have removed APIs that were deprecated in the ROS 1.0 release.

To report bugs, please use the ROS issue issue tracker.

This release focused on new features for rosbag and rxbag, as well as new APIs for rosbuild, new std_msgs/Time and Duration msgs, and a rosclean tool for easily removing log files. Please see the full change list for more details.

The SVN tag will will be using for testing the ROS 1.2 release candidates is: https://code.ros.org/svn/ros/stacks/ros/tags/cturtle

We will soon be releasing an alpha version of ROS C-Turtle, so please stay tuned.

-- your friendly neighborhood ROS development team

We're getting close to being feature-complete for most of the C-Turtle stacks. There has been a flurry of releases with the expected functionality for the next distribution release, and we will be stabilizing these over the next several weeks as we finalize C-Turtle.

• camera_drivers 1.1.0
• driver_common 1.0.3
• image_pipeline 1.1.5
• navigation 1.0.7
• navigation 1.1.3
• pr2_calibration 0.4.2
• pr2_doors 0.3.0
• pr2_ethercat_drivers 1.1.3
• pr2_robot 0.4.6
• robot_model 1.1.4
• roslisp_support 0.2.4
• simulator_stage 1.1.1
• vision_opencv 1.2.3
• visualization 1.1.1
• visualization_common 1.1.1
• web_interface 0.4.0

Change lists

• camera_drivers
• driver_common
• image_pipeline
• navigation
• pr2_calibration
• pr2_doors
• pr2_ethercat_drivers
• pr2_robot
• robot_model
• roslisp_support
• simulator_stage
• vision_opencv
• visualization
• visualization_common
• web_interface

ROS 1.0.4 (stable/boxturtle) has been released. This release fixes a regression in roscpp's getParamCached() method that meant it hit the master every time it was called if the parameter didn't exist.

Full 1.0 changelist

Several patch releases have been made, including ROS 1.1.7, which fixes issues with roslaunch and paramiko on Ubuntu Jaunty. The rest of the patch releases are for Box Turtle and are listed below.

• ros 1.1.7
• driver_common 1.0.2
• joystick_drivers 1.0.3
• pr2_power_drivers 1.0.5
• simulator_stage 1.0.1
• web_interface 0.3.20
• visualization 1.0.4

Change lists

• ros
• driver_common
• joystick_drivers
• pr2_power_drivers
• simulator_stage
• web_interface
• visualization

ROS 1.1.6 has been released. This will be one of the last releases in the 1.1.x series as we are quickly approaching feature freeze. You can read the change list for more information. NOTE: ROS 1.1.5 contains an error with the gtest package and should not be used.

Several other stacks in the C-Turtle unstable development series have been updated as well, including:

• common 1.1.13
• image_common 1.1.0
• joystick_drivers 1.1.1
• navigation 1.1.2
• pr2_calibration 0.4.1
• pr2_ethercat_drivers 1.1.2
• robot_model 1.1.3
• slam_gmapping 1.1.1
• sound_drivers 1.1.0

Change lists

• common
• image_common
• joystick_drivers
• navigation
• pr2_calibration
• pr2_ethercat_drivers
• robot_model
• slam_gmapping
• sound_drivers

geometry 1.1.2 and robot_model 1.1.2

This announces geometry 1.1.2 and robot_model 1.1.2 are released into latest. These are unstable releases, with API changes. Unless you are working toward the next release it is recommended to remain on boxturtle.

Note: There are some permutations of updating which creates a linking error for undefined references into bullet. If you get these errors, use rosmake with the --pre-clean option and it will work fine. This has only been observed when following a specific sequence of updates.

• geometry change list
• robot_model change list

point_cloud_perception 0.1.6

PCL (Point Cloud Library) 0.1.6 and the point_cloud_perception stack have been released!

We're slowly adding more functionality, fixing bugs, and writing documentation and tutorials for early adopters. Please check out http://www.ros.org/wiki/pcl for more information and don't forget to keep an eye on the tutorials section. PCL requires the latest branch, which is unstable and only recommended if you want to play with cutting edge features.

We are going to have two talks about PCL at ICRA (check out our schedule for details), so please stop by, and come talk to us afterwards. We're also going to showcase some of the PCL functionality at the Willow Garage booth. Looking forward to see you there!

Thanks to everyone that contributed!

point_cloud_perception change list

ROS 1.0.3 has been released! This is a patch update for users of Box Turtle. We recommend that all Box Turtle users upgrade to this new version. This update also includes new compatibility with the recent release of Ubuntu Lucid Lynx. Our debian packages are currently building and should be ready soon. rosinstall and SVN users can update now.

We appreciate all the ROS users who have contributed bug reports and patches that have made this release possible. The list of changes is below.

-- your friendly neighborhood ROS team

Change list

• rosmake patch to not try to clean rospack if ROS_NOBUILD present. r9156
• roslib: bug fix to roslib.list_stacks_by_path() when following symlinks (#2638)
• rxgraph: patch for xdot issue with certain dot files #2586 r9280
• rospy: fix to handle double shutdown signal case better #2369 r9348
• roslaunch: fixed name resolution of node command-line arguments and fixed usage statement #2309 r9361
• rosrecord: fixed bug in rosplay timeshifting #1327
• genmsg_cpp: fixed bug in string constant generation for rosjava, r9400.
• updated top-level rosdep.yaml to include Ubuntu Lucid definitions r9409

We've updated quick a few stacks in the past week. As you can tell from the dual 1.0.x and 1.1.x releases, we are moving forward on our C-Turtle development, though we are continuing to patch problems with Box Turtle as necessary.

• common 1.0.4
• common 1.1.2
• diagnostics 1.0.3
• diagnostics 1.1.0
• image_pipeline 1.0.3
• image_pipeline 1.1.4
• pr2_common_actions 0.1.5
• pr2_doors 0.2.10
• pr2_ethercat_drivers 1.0.4
• pr2_mechanism 1.0.4
• pr2_plugs 0.2.7
• pr2_power_drivers 1.0.4
• pr2_robot 0.3.10
• pr2_robot 0.4.3
• texas_drivers 0.2.12
• web_interface 0.3.19

Change lists

• common
• common
• diagnostics
• diagnostics
• image_pipeline
• image_pipeline
• pr2_common_actions
• pr2_doors
• pr2_ethercat_drivers
• pr2_mechanism
• pr2_plugs
• pr2_power_drivers
• pr2_robot
• pr2_robot
• texas_drivers
• web_interface

Several stacks have been updated, including the unstable ROS 1.1 series. Both joystick_drivers and laser_drivers have also started 1.1.x unstable development releases to test new features for C-Turtle.

• ros 1.1.4
• camera_drivers 0.9.3
• image_pipeline 1.0.2
• joystick_drivers 1.0.2
• joystick_drivers 1.1.0
• laser_drivers 1.0.5
• laser_drivers 1.1.0
• navigation 1.0.6
• pr2_apps 0.2.2
• pr2_common_actions 0.1.4
• pr2_ethercat_drivers 1.1.1
• pr2_plugs 0.2.6

Change lists

• ros
• camera_drivers
• image_pipeline
• joystick_drivers
• joystick_drivers
• laser_drivers
• laser_drivers
• navigation
• pr2_apps
• pr2_common_actions
• pr2_ethercat_drivers
• pr2_plugs

ROS 1.1.3 has been released as a minor update to the 1.1.2 release. This release fixes a minor issue with rosmake that affects shared installations of ROS.

ROS 1.1.2 has been released. This is an unstable release to test new features for ROS.

The major new feature with this release is integration of roslisp. roslisp is a full-featured Common Lisp client library for ROS that is being developed by Bhaskara Marthi (Willow Garage) and Lorenz Mösenlechner (TUM). We are now including it in the ROS stack to enable more easily access its capabilities, especially in shared install setups where ROS messages have already been built.

This update does not require ROS users to install Lisp. We have created a separate "roslisp_support" stack with a "roslisp_runtime" package that will trigger an install of SBCL, when required. Current users will have to make sure to add a dependency on the roslisp_runtime package so that installation scripts work properly.

Another major update in this release is performance updates for rospy message serialization. The new optimizations should result in performance improvement of 2x or better for many types of messages, mainly thank to James Bowman's patches.

As with our previous unstable releases, we ask that general users refrain from updating to this release unless they need to test integration for the upcoming C-turtle distribution. We do recommend that roslisp users test this new setup and provide feedback on this new roslisp core integration.

For more updates in this release, please see the full change list

-- your friendly neighborhood ROS team

ROS 1.0.2 has been released! This is a patch update for users of Box Turtle. We recommend that all Box Turtle users upgrade to this new version. Our debian packages are currently building and should be ready soon. rosinstall and SVN users can update now.

We appreciate all the ROS users who have contributed bug reports and patches that have made this release possible. The list of changes is below.

-- your friendly neighborhood ROS team

Links:

• ROS installation instruction
• Change list

visualization_common 1.1.0 and visualization 1.1.0 have been released. This is an unstable development release to try out features considered for inclusion in their 1.2 versions. visualization 1.0 will work with visualization_common 1.1, but visualization 1.1 requires visualization_common 1.1. The largest changes in these releases involve additions to the visualization_msgs/Marker API.

Change lists

• visualization_common
• visualization

The following stacks have been updated, including the brand-new topological_navigation research stack.

• image_pipeline 1.1.2
• imu_drivers 1.1.0
• pr2_power_drivers 1.0.3
• robot_model 1.0.2
• simulator_gazebo 1.0.5
• topological_navigation 0.1.0
• visualization 1.0.3
• vision_opencv 1.0.2

Change lists

• image_pipeline
• imu_drivers
• pr2_power_drivers
• robot_model
• simulator_gazebo
• topological_navigation
• visualization
• vision_opencv

navigation 1.1.0 has been released. This is an unstable development release to try out features considered for inclusion in navigation 1.2. The 1.1.0 release contains a service call for navfn that allows plans to be made via ROS, a service call to move_base that clears unknown space in the costmap, and a fix to velocity computation in the base_local_planner that could allow robots to drive a bit faster but needs testing to be sure its safe. Unless you have an immediate need for features in the 1.1 series, it is recommended that you use the 1.0 series until things stabilize with a 1.2 release.

Hope all is well,

Eitan

Change List:

• move_base
  • Added a clear_unknown_space service to move_base that allows external users to clear unknown space around the robot in the costmap.
• navfn
  • Adding a make_plan service to navfn that allows the use of the planner via ROS.
• costmap_2d
  • Changing ROS_ASSERT to ROS_FATAL with a std::runtime_error when checking for legal configurations.
  • Costmap2DROS is now const correct
• base_local_planner
  • Bug fix for how velocities were being computed. This fix will make the robot a bit more aggressive in how it drives and is going into the 1.1 series for testing.

The following stacks have been updated with patches:

• pr2_robot 0.3.8
• pr2_plugs 0.2.5
• pr2_web_apps 0.3.6
• point_cloud_perception 0.1.1
• simulator_gazebo 1.1.2

Change lists

• pr2_robot
• pr2_plugs
• pr2_web_apps
• point_cloud_perception
• simulator_gazebo

pr2_controllers 1.1.0 has been released. This is an unstable development release to try out features considered for inclusion in pr2_controllers 1.2. The 1.1.0 release contains some additional configuration options and a new joint trajectory controller with an action interface built in.

Change list

• The projector controller now updates the projector current setting each time through the realtime loop. Otherwise, some lockout conditions were causing the current to be set to zero, and it was never being reset to the proper value.
• pr2_controllers_msgs now autogenerates its action messages during build step. Removed the autogenerated files from version control
• pr2_gripper_action now depends explicitly on pr2_mechanism_model.
• Upped the tolerance for determining that a joint is stopped in the joint trajectory action to handle jittering in gazebo.
• Removed push_back from the realtime part of the calibration controllers (#3949)
• Made the stall velocity threshold configurable in pr2_gripper_action (#4073)
• Created the joint trajectory action controller, which combines the joint spline trajectory controller and the joint trajectory action.
• Upped tolerance for determining if the controller is following a different goal in the pr2_gripper_action (#4076)
• Joint trajectory action controller now accepts goals with a timestamp of 0 (#3896)

slam_gmapping 1.1.0 has been released. As with all 1.1.x stacks, this release is unstable and not recommend for most users. This release adds a couple of features that help with autonomous exploration.

This is a good time to put in patches and requests for features to be added in the 1.1.x series: https://code.ros.org/trac/ros-pkg/newticket

Change lists

• slam_gmapping

We've released several patch updates for our stacks. For Box Turtle, visualization and pr2_simulator has been updated. Several other development stacks have also been updated.

• pr2_simulator 1.0.3
• pr2_doors 0.2.8
• texas_drivers 0.2.10

• web_interface 0.3.16

• visualization 1.0.2

Change lists

• visualization
• pr2_simulator
• pr2_doors
• texas_drivers
• web_interface

The following stack have been updated:

• arm_navigation 0.2.2
• motion_planning_common 0.2.1
• pr2_arm_navigation 0.2.1
• texas_drivers 0.2.9
• trajectory_filters 0.2.2
• wifi_drivers 0.1.3

These updates are mostly compatibility fixes for ROS 1.1 and minor bug fixes.

Change lists

• arm_navigation
• motion_planning_common
• pr2_arm_navigation
• texas_drivers
• trajectory_filters
• wifi_drivers

ROS 1.1 has been released. This is an unstable development release to test and develop features for ROS 1.2. This comes quickly on the heals of the 1.1 release yesterday due to a bug in the new service generators. It also has some other miscellaneous changes.

Change list

• rosmaster: subscribers now declare topic types, though they cannot overriding existing type declarations (r8745)
• rosmaster: roslib.masterapi: Added getTopicTypes() to support subscribers declaring types (r8745)
• rospy: bug fix to on_shutdown() (#2536 r8746)
• rospy: removed support for deprecated /time topic
• rostopic: support for subscriber-declared types (uses new getTopicTypes()) Master method
• roslib: Links against rt to fix linking with the gold linker
• roscpp: Fixed service generators to work with concurrent builds

• roscpp: Removed support for deprecated /time topic

  -- your friendly neighborhood ROS development team