Members of the Open Robotics community can save 20% off registration by using the discount code: VICSRobotics.

This year, the Summit will feature a panel entitled: Robots on the Rise, The Future of Robotics and AI, moderated by Stanford University Professor, Oussama Khatib, and joined by panelists Cynthia Breazeal, Associate Prof. at MIT & Founder and Chief Scientist of Jibo, Inc.; Eric Krotkov, COO at Toyota Research Institute; Marc Raibert, Founder and CEO of Boston Dynamics; and Grant Imahara, Consulting Mechanical Designer, Disney Research and Host, Discovery Channel’s MythBusters.

Marc Raibert of Boston Dynamics will be bringing SpotMini – the robot dog

After the days sessions, there is a night of festivities and entertainment with the IEEE Honors Ceremony which celebrates the contributions of some of the greatest minds of our time who have made a lasting impact on society for the benefit of humanity In other words, the Academy Awards for Technologists and Engineers.

Your all access pass includes

● All summit sessions
● Networking breakfast and demos
● Luncheon mixer and networking reception
● Ticket to the Honors Ceremony with 3-course dinner
● Entertainment

Learn more and register at www.ieee-vics.org. This event will sell out so secure your seat early.

Dr. Morgan Quigley and Dr. Michael Grey will be the first employees working in the Singapore office. We will be hiring to grow the team as we work with local partners to continue the development and evangelism of ROS and Gazebo, as well as to focus on efforts around ROS 2. If you would like to join us in Singapore, please keep an eye out for local job openings.

According to our most recent metrics, half of the top ten countries of origin for visitors to the ROS wiki are in Asia, but it doesn’t take a mathematician (or a roboticist) to realize the importance of the Asia-Pacific market, particularly for robotics. Needless to say, we are very excited to be setting up shop in Singapore and look forward to sharing more information about our plans, partners and progress.

By nature and by profession, our work typically happens behind the scenes. Ours is the software inside the robot, and the simulation software that helps companies and individuals build those robots. We’re not the slick robots moving items through a warehouse or making farming more efficient; we’ll leave that to fellow honorees Fetch Robotics and Blue River Technology. But both of those companies, and others on this list, make use of our software. Their success is our success, and for that we are very proud.

To the team at Fast Company, thank you for the acknowledgment of our work! We are humbled and honored to be so recognized. And to the users, contributors, developers, and champions of open source robotics technology, we owe you a debt of gratitude as well.

Toyota Research Institute (TRI) continues its commitment to open source robotics software by renewing its charitable contribution to the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF). For the second consecutive year, TRI is donating $1 million to OSRF which offers the global robotics community access to open source robotics software and development tools.

We’re immensely grateful for TRI’s continued generosity and ongoing commitment to open source!

The Fireworks presented their team and technical approach to the competition, and also gave us a live demo of their robot.

Along the way we learned that in addition to competing themselves, the Fireworks are active in outreach and mentoring for other students, especially women, through their Gist2Wist organization.

If this group is any indication, we’ll soon see some impressive and enthusiastic talent coming into the robotics field!

Partial group photo of the ROSCon 2017 Diversity Scholarship recipients and Diversity Committee.

To get a sense of the impact that the ROSCon Diversity Scholarship Program had this year, we’re proud to share some comments from scholarship recipients about their experience about the conference and the ROS community as a whole:

The ROSCon Diversity Scholarship Program provided me with an opportunity that would have been completely impossible without it. I was able to attend my first robotics conference and feel empowered to keep working to try and make a positive impact on this community. Also, it was very encouraging to see so many companies stepping up to promote and enable diversity within their companies and the robotics community. Thank you!

This conference was an amazing eye-opening for me. I loved how these big projects apply ROS on real solutions, and how they are pushing forward the current boundaries on equipment and data managing. Thanks so much for this opportunity, and honored and so thankful to be part of this community!

A big thank you goes out to the scholarship recipients for helping us make ROSCon more representative of the global and diverse ROS community, and to the ROSCon Diversity Committee and the conference’s diversity program sponsors, without which this wouldn’t have been possible:

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.

By porting a few other packages for vision and robot motion, we are now able to perform vision-based manipulation using an industrial robot arm 100% ROS 2 code. We like to call this the “picky robot” because it can preferentially push food it doesn’t like off the table and into the trash.

For even more details, attend our upcoming ROSCon 2017 talk, “Using ROS2 for Vision-Based Manipulation with Industrial Robots,”.

The demo is open source and available on Github (still in development). We’re excited to integrate even more use cases and platforms with ROS 2 moving forward!

We’re anticipating another record year with more proposals, talks, and sponsors than ever before!

To save money, remember to book your hotel room soon as well. More information is available at: http://roscon.ros.org/2017/#location.

For more information about ROSCon including the program and information on the location please visit: http://roscon.ros.org/

We’re happy to announce some great new sponsors for ROSCon: SICK, Apex.AI, NVIDIA, Voyage, and Ubuntu.

Thanks to our Platinum Sponsor: Intel.
Thanks to our Gold Sponsors: Clearpath, Erle, Fetch, GaiTech, Locus, Rapyuta, and SICK.
Thanks to our Video Archive Sponsor: Ubuntu

This year saw a record response from the community, with 107 proposals submitted. Following discussion and tough decision-making among the Program Committee, we decided to accept 38 proposals for presentation (35.5% acceptance rate).

In recent years we made room in the program for 20-25 presentations, in a mixture of long (~40-minute) and medium (~20-minute) durations. This year, given the large number of high-quality proposals that were submitted, we’re trying something new, which is to add a category for short presentations, at 5 minutes each. These slots will allow the presenters to briefly introduce their work and entice the audience to follow up in person to learn more.

To encourage those in-person interactions, we’re adding another new feature this year, which is a poster session wherein attendees can find and discuss with the presenters the work that most piqued their interest. The poster session will be held at the end of the first day, during the first half of the reception.

In exchange for these additions to the program, this year we will not be holding the customary birds of a feather (BoF) sessions. While those ad hoc meetings were fun and lively in the early years, as the conference has grown it has become harder to keep them useful to a broad audience, and we’ve seen participation dropping in recent years. As always, we’re experimenting to find the best program mix for the community, and we look forward to getting your feedback on this year’s lineup.

We hope to see you in Vancouver for ROSCon in September! As a reminder, the deadline for early registration is August 1. Register today.

— Your friendly neighborhood ROSCon 2017 Organizing Committee

Thank you to our Platinum Sponsor: Intel!
Thank you to our Gold Sponsors: Clearpath, Erle, Fetch, Gaitech, Locus, and Rapyuta!

ARIAC is a simulation-based competition designed to promote agility in industrial robot systems by utilizing the latest advances in artificial intelligence and robot planning. The goal is to enable industrial robots on the shop floors to be more productive, more autonomous, and more responsive to the needs of shop floor workers. The virtual nature of the competition enabled participation of teams affiliated with companies and research institutions from across three continents.

While autonomously completing pick-and-place kit assembly tasks, teams were presented with various agility challenges developed based on input from industry representatives. These challenges include failing suction grippers, notification of faulty parts, and reception of high-priority orders that would prompt teams to decide whether or not to reuse existing in-progress kits.

Teams had control over their system’s suite of sensors positioned throughout the workcell, made up of laser scanners, intelligent vision sensors, quality control sensors and interruptible photoelectric break-beams. Each team participating in the finals chose a unique sensor configuration with varying associated costs and impact on the team’s strategy.

The diversity in the teams’ strategies and the impact of their sensor configurations can be seen in the video of highlights from the finals:

Scoring was performed based on a combination of performance, efficiency and cost metrics over 15 trials. The overall standings of the top teams are as follows.

First place: Realization of Robotics Systems, Center for Advanced Manufacturing, University of Southern California

Second place: FIGMENT, Pernambuco Federal Institute of Education, Science, and Technology / Federal University of Pernambuco

Third place: TeamCase, Case Western Reserve University

Top-performing teams will be presenting at IROS 2017 in Vancouver, Canada in a workshop held on Sunday, September 24th. Details for interested parties are available at https://www.nist.gov/el/intelligent-systems-division-73500/agile-robotics-industrial-automation-competition-ariac

The IROS workshop is open to all, even those that did not compete. In addition to having presentations about approaches used in the competition, we will also be exploring plans for future competitions. If you would like to give a presentation about agility challenges you would like to see in future competitions, please contact Craig Schlenoff (craig.schlenoff@nist.gov).

Congratulations to all teams that participated in the competition. We look forward to seeing you in Vancouver!

We leveraged Gazebo’s capabilities to incorporate existing models and sensors.
The world contains a new model of Mcity and a freeway interchange. There are also models from the gazebo models repository including dumpsters, traffic cones, and a gas station. On the vehicle itself there is a 16 beam lidar on the roof, 8 ultrasonic sensors, 4 cameras, and 2 planar lidar.

The simulation is open source and available at on GitHub at osrf/car_demo. Try it out by installing nvidia-docker and pulling “osrf/car_demo” from Docker Hub. More information about building and running is available in the README in the source repository.

We then switched gears at SPiN, a nice bar-restaurant where you can eat, drink, listen music and play ping pong.

Some of us discovered that 8 people can play ping pong on the same table at the same time!

Fun!

To create the scene shown in the video we made several improvements to the Gazebo rendering component. First, we extended Gazebo’s ability to load and render large a high resolution (8K) DEM model by 1) adding Level-Of-Detail (LOD) support, which made it possible to render large terrains at improved rendering performance; and 2) caching and saving of heightmap data to disk, which significantly reduced the load time of the model. We then added support for using custom shaders with Gazebo heightmaps. The heightmap model in the video uses a high resolution texture map, normal map, bump map, and illumination map, and applies Hapke shading and real time shadows in custom shaders. We also increased the shadow texture size and tweaked a few shadow parameters in an effort to generate sharper shadows. Finally, we post-process the scene by adding some nice looking lens flare effect to the camera.

We’re looking forward to further improving rendering in Gazebo and providing examples of what you can do to get more realistic camera images in your own simulations.

Congratulations to everybody who contributed to the construction of the sign!

Prior to ICRA, Tully will be on-hand and on the agenda at the ROS-Industrial Asia Pacific workshop. The event is May 25-26 with further details here.

During ICRA, we’ll be spending lots of our time with the team at ROBOTIS, both at their booth and as part of Intel & ROBOTIS Night.

At ICRA, the ROBOTIS booth will be showing off TurtleBot 3 during the following hours:

• May 30 (Tuesday): 08:00 – 17:00
• May 31 (Wednesday): 08:20 –17:00
• June 1 (Thursday): – 08:20 – 17:00

Lastly, Morgan will be part of a ROS and TurtleBot 3 tutorial at National University of Singapore. The tutorial is June 2nd from 10:00 to 4:00 pm. Details and RSVP information is here.

Today we are announcing that we are changing our name to Open Robotics. Information about our work will be found at http://www.openrobotics.org. Open Robotics employee emails are migrating from @localhost to @openrobotics.org.

Technical and community information on Gazebo and ROS will continue to live at http://gazebosim.org/ and http://www.ros.org/, respectively.

Open Robotics will continue to create, distribute, and support open source tools for the robotics community, including ROS and Gazebo. OSRF will continue to hold intellectual property (e.g., copyright on code) on our open work. If you have any questions about the name change, please let us know.

Register now!

Note that the early registration deadline is August 1, 2017.

After lunch we headed to San Francisco to flex our brains at an escape room. We’re proud to say that one of our teams successfully escaped. Congratulations to Adam, Chris, Ian, Louise, and Mikael!

We finished the day with a waterfront dinner with a great view of the Bay Bridge:

A good time was had by all.

ARIAC is a simulation-based competition is designed to promote agility in industrial robot systems by utilizing the latest advances in artificial intelligence and robot planning. The goal is to enable industrial robots on the shop floors to be more productive, more autonomous, and to require less time from shop floor workers. You can learn more about the competition here. The top performing teams will be invited to present at a workshop held during IROS 2017 in Vancouver.

So far we have completed Qualifiers 1 and 2, highlights of which you can see here:

and here:

While the first two Qualifiers are now closed, there’s still time to join the competition. You have until May 15, 2017 to submit your results from Qualifier 3 and secure a spot in the final competition, to be held in early June. To learn how to participate, visit the ARIAC site.

He received a Bachelors with honors from SJSU and has continued to educate himself through taking on new challenges. Prior to joining, he was part of a team creating proprietary robots using ROS and Gazebo. When he isn’t typing away at a computer he’s likely hiking or flying RC airplanes.

Stay tuned for more information on ROSCon 2017.

Chris has lived and worked in both the United States and Europe, so has a healthy appreciation for beer from both sides of the Atlantic. When he’s not writing software, you can find him on the ski slopes, paddling his kayak around nearby lakes, or reading a favorite novel.

This year marks the occasion of ROS turning 9 years old! Through these years ROS has grown into a strong world-wide community. It’s a community with a large variety of interests: from academic researchers to robotic product developers as well as the many robot users. Academic use of ROS continues to grow. Citations of the first ROS paper “ROS: An Open-Source Robot Operating System” has grown to 2,871.

To get a better sense of what’s happening in the ROS community, if you have not already done so, I highly recommend reviewing the ROSCon 2016 program. You can also find all the video recordings in this gallery. ROSCon 2016 was another great event bringing ROS community members together to share how they’re using ROS to solve their challenges. As the goal of ROSCon is to share information between the entire community we record the talks and make them available online. We’ve sold out our venues the last two years and are looking forward to another ROSCon next fall!

Part of understanding our growing community is to try to measure it. For the last 6 years we’ve been generating metrics reports. These reports can give a sense of aggregate what’s happening in the ROS community. Our most recent report is from July 2016. David Lu has put together plots of several of the metrics across the last 6 years which can be quite informative.

This year we wanted to dig a little deeper into the code metrics, so we downloaded the source of all of packages listed in the Indigo Igloo rosdistro and ran some analysis.

• The total line count is over 14 million lines of code
• There have been 2477 authors
• And 181509 commits
• Averaging 73.3 commits per author

You can see the commits as a function of month in this graph.

Our committers are active around the world as evidenced by the commits coming in at all hours of the day.

And the git commits record 24 different time zones (out of 39 possible).

Analyzing the repository for significant lines of code using [SLOCCount](http://www.dwheeler.com/sloccount/) shows:

• 4,077,199 significant lines of code.
• This represents an estimated 1,236 person-years of development.
• For a sense of scale, that is an average of 137 developers contributing full time over the last 9 years!

For those of you curious about the breakdown by language lines of code, it is as follows:

• cpp: 2608592 (63.98%)
• python: 553332 (13.57%)
• ansic: 297629 (7.30%)
• xml: 280615 (6.88%)
• lisp: 149439 (3.67%)
• java: 135343 (3.32%)
• ruby: 26484 (0.65%)
• sh: 21120 (0.52%)

This only represents the packages publicly released into the Indigo rosdistro index.

Note that the tools only worked on Git repos so code from other source control systems was excluded. There are also a few projects which predate ROS but have ported to use ROS and their history is included.

We’re looking forward to continuing growth through 2017 leading up to the 10-year anniversary of ROS. With the Beta 1 version of ROS 2.0 out, there will be space for new development. We’re looking forward to our next release, Lunar Loggerhead, to coincide with Ubuntu’s next release, Zesty Zapus. With both of these, the ROS community can continue to rely on the many libraries, tools, and capabilities they have come to know and enjoy, as well as begin to experiment with the new features in ROS 2.0

Another exciting project to watch is the upcoming TurtleBot 3! The TurtleBot and TurtleBot 2 have been great platforms for learning and prototyping. However by packing that same capability into a smaller platform with more punch we look forward to it providing another avenue to grow the ROS community.

We write these anniversary posts to help give you a sense of how ROS has been doing over the past year, but we’d certainly encourage you to find out for yourself. Get involved. Write or edit a wiki page. Answer a question on ROS Answers. Come to ROSCon. And, when you’re ready, think about helping to maintain ROS itself, or even contributing a brand new ROS package.

OSRF is doing great, but the long-term success of ROS depends on every member of the incredibly awesome ROS community. If you’re already an active part of the ROS community, we can’t thank you enough; and if you’re not, think about how you can help ROS grow and thrive for the next nine years, and beyond.

Statistics like these only tell part of the story. What’s more significant for us is how ROS is changing from a way to make robotics research simpler and more collaborative to a foundation that encourages and facilitates a rapidly-maturing robotics industry. Nearly two thirds of ROSCon 2016 participants were from industry (as opposed to academia), and the selection of talks included topics such as calibration, testing, deployment, security, and support of ROS-based robots in operational environments. One highlight was the introduction of H-ROS (Hardware Robot Operating System), which leverages ROS 2 to make hardware from different manufacturers interoperable with a minimum amount of hassle.

Another trend we noticed this year was a substantial and wide-ranging effort at making ROS simpler and more accessible to new users. We had presentations on Gazebo usability upgrades, drones optimized for ROS development, and a new ROS package that lets you visually program robots by moving around graphical blocks. Intel showed up with an all-in-one robotics perception device called Euclid, which is an integrated 3D sensing and computing platform (based on a RealSense camera and Atom processor) that makes sophisticated computer vision easy and affordable. Also introduced at ROSCon 2016 was the Turtlebot 3, a collaboration between OSRF and ROBOTIS, which shrinks the Turtlebot research and education platform down to something backpack-sized while making it more customizable and much more affordable.

We’d also like to highlight a new diversity program that we began this year; one designed to help enable participation in ROSCon by those typically underrepresented in the tech community. We set aside a full 10% of the ROSCon 2016 conference budget to help sixteen roboticists who otherwise wouldn’t have been able to make it to Seoul for the conference. To get a sense of the impact that the diversity program had this year, we’d encourage you to watch this lightning talk from Ahmed Abdalla and Husam Salih, two students at the University of Khartoum in Sudan, who are starting a robotics lab from scratch under severe government sanctions.

Thanks to our fantastic organizing team, all of the ROSCon videos and presentations are already available. You can find them on the ROSCon 2016 website here. We’re already looking forward to ROSCon 2017.

Another year, another collection of creative and sometimes topical costumes. Happy Halloween, everybody!

Photo credit: Evan Ackerman

A full-time developer sponsored by Bosch’s Research and Technology Center in North America will begin working with Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) this month to advance the development of Robotics Open Source 2, the two organizations announced today. This announcement not only demonstrates the mutual commitment of Bosch and OSRF to the development of ROS 2 but also to the worldwide community of ROS developers and supporters.

ROS 2 is the next generation of ROS, a set of libraries and tools that simplify the task of creating and programming robotic platforms and applications. An update on ROS 2 will be made by Deanna Hood and William Woodall at ROSCon, the upcoming developer conference October 8-9 in Seoul, Korea.

“The development of ROS has been a collaborative effort from the beginning, and we are thrilled to continue that tradition with the support of Bosch,” said Brian Gerkey, CEO of Open Source Robotics Foundation. “We look forward to welcoming our newest ROS 2 team member.”

“We are honored to be a part of the movement that’s helping developers to create groundbreaking robotics technologies for industries all over the world,” said Axel Wendt, group manager for Robotics at the Research and Technology Center in Palo Alto. “This partnership delivers on our objective to cultivate and to drive innovation from the ground up.”

“The collaboration with OSRF is well aligned with our worldwide efforts in robotics research at Bosch,” said Kai Arras, head of robotics research at Robert Bosch GmbH. “We are glad to contribute back to the open source community in this way and look forward to new, exciting features of ROS 2 that are relevant to the industry.”

The CEO of TRI, Gill Pratt, is very familiar with us and our work, including our contributions to the DARPA Robotics Challenge, for which he was the program manager.

As Gill says in our release:

I’ve witnessed first-hand the value of the Open Source Robotics Foundation. Of the twenty-three teams that competed in the DARPA Robotics Challenge eighteen used ROS and fourteen used Gazebo. Through this charitable contribution, TRI will support efforts to grow the capabilities of ROS and Gazebo, not only for TRI, but also for the hundreds of thousands of members of the open source robotics community.

Part of today’s announcement also includes the news that we have created the Open Source Robotics Corporation, a for-profit subsidiary of OSRF. We will continue to create and distribute open source and free-of-charge applications for the robotics community, including ROS and Gazebo. If you have specific questions about our reorganization, please let us know.

In 2014, DARPA announced its Hand Proprioception and Touch Interfaces (HAPTIX) program, which “seeks to create a prosthetic hand system that moves and provides sensation like a natural hand.”

According to Doug Weber, DARPA program manager of HAPTIX: “We believe that HAPTIX will create a sensory experience so rich and vibrant that the user will want to wear his or her prosthesis full-time and accept it as a natural extension of the body. If we can achieve that, DARPA is even closer to fulfilling its commitment to help restore full and natural functionality to wounded service members.”

Three different teams are involved in the HAPTIX project, and its success will depend on a carefully optimized mix of hardware, user interfaces, and control algorithms. OSRF is proud to be providing a customized version of the Gazebo simulator to the HAPTIX teams, allowing them to run tests on their software without being constrained by hardware availability: essentially, a kind of virtual playground for software engineers.

“The goal of HAPTIX is for OSRF to provide a realistic prosthetic simulation environment for biomechanical engineers to develop controllers for advanced prosthetics with high degrees of freedom,” explains John Hsu, co-founder and Chief Scientist at OSRF. The advanced prosthesis that DARPA is using in the HAPTIX program is DEKA’s “Luke” robotic arm, a 14 DoF cybernetic total arm replacement system. However, the arm is currently controlled by simple user interfaces designed for testing, and part of what HAPTIX hopes to deliver are interfaces that utilize control signals from muscles and nerves, while simultaneously delivering sensory feedback.

After nearly ten years of work and $40 million from DARPA, DEKA’s robotic arm is an amazing piece of hardware, but that’s just the beginning. “The hardware, in my opinion, needs to come before the software,” says Hsu. “They can be designed at the same time, but the hardware has a longer iteration cycle. Once you develop a nice hardware platform that’s stable, then you give it to the software team, and they take off, working really fast on the software while in the meantime trying not to break the hardware.”

This illustrates two reasons why having a good simulation environment is important: first, it lets you start working on the software before the hardware is fully complete, and second, it to some extent insulates software development from the hardware itself, meaning that you can have lots of engineers developing software in parallel, even if you only have one piece of hardware that may be fragile, expensive, and quite often inoperable for one reason or another.

For OSRF, creating and supporting a version of Gazebo for the HAPTIX program involves many different areas. Besides the customized simulation environment, OSRF has also provided teams with an OptiTrack motion capture device, NVIDIA stereo glasses and a 3D monitor, a 3D joystick, and the documentation required to get it all working together flawlessly. This custom version of Gazebo also includes support for a variety of teleoperation hardware, and for the first time, users can interact programmatically with the simulation using both Windows and MATLAB. HAPTIX developers can leverage these 3D sensors and teleoperation systems to translate the motions of physical arms and hands into virtual environments, allowing them to run common hand function tests in the real world and in simulation at the same time. This also lays the foundation for a framework that could provide amputees a powerful and affordable way to learn how to use their new prosthesis.

Once the HAPTIX teams receive their DEKA arms, OSRF’s job becomes even more important, according to Hsu, because they’ll get a chance to see how well the simulation is actually working and then refine it to bring it as close to reality as possible. “I’m really looking forward to the validation part,” Hsu says. “I think that’s one of the big missing pieces for many simulation platforms: good validation data. When we were working on Gazebo for the DARPA Robotics Challenge, we never had an ATLAS robot. Getting the DEKA hand to do validation is huge.”

Validation is the process of making sure that commands sent to the simulated DEKA arm result in the same movements as identical commands sent to the real DEKA arm. “We send commands to the real hand and the simulated hand to see if they behave differently,” explains Hsu. “If they do, we update our model to make them match.” The closer the simulation matches, the more useful it will be to the HAPTIX teams. The end goal is, of course, to get everything working on the real hardware, but an accurate and detailed simulator is critical to the development of effective software.

The first generation of the DEKA arm recently arrived at OSRF for validation testing, and the complete hardware is expected before the end of the year. OSRF has been steadily releasing a series of stable versions of the HAPTIX simulator, and as the fidelity of simulated position holding, force control and response, and other dynamics are verified on the arm over the next few months, OSRF will continue upgrading the simulation software to make sure that the HAPTIX teams have all of the tools that they need to progress as quickly and efficiently as possible.

By early 2017, Phase 1 of HAPTIX will be complete, and the software and hardware components that prove to be the most successful will continue into Phase 2, the end goal of which is a complete, functional HAPTIX system. DARPA is hoping that take-home trials of such a system will happen by 2019, and that soon after, any amputee who needs one will be able to benefit from a prosthetic hand that acts (and feels) just like the real thing.

If you know anything about ROS and robots, then by now you know about the integration between ROS and Intel’s RealSense Camera.

Given this relationship, you can expect to see and hear a lot about ROS next week at IDF.

We encourage you to check out these sessions next week in San Francisco:

• Wednesday 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM : Intel Robotics Overview (Level 2 Room 2004)
• Wednesday 1:15 PM – 2:15 PM : Intel RealSense Technology: Adding Human-like Sensing to Devices (Level 2 Room 2016)
• Wednesday 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM : Getting Started with the Intel RealSense Robotic Development Kit (Level 2 Room 2004)
• Thursday 9:30 AM – 11:45 AM : Introduction to Autonomous Robots (Level 2 Lab Room 2011)

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)

* The deadline for submitting presentation proposals is July 8, 2016. If you want to present your work at ROSCon this year, make sure to submit your proposal before the deadline: http://roscon.ros.org/2016/#call-for-proposals.
* The conference will be held at the Conrad Seoul. Hotel rooms at the discounted conference rate are limited! Reserve your room today. http://roscon.ros.org/2016/#location. Also listed are some options for child care during the conference, which we hope will be helpful for attendees traveling with families.
* Registration will open in a couple of weeks: http://roscon.ros.org/2016/#important-dates.

We can’t put on ROSCon without the support of our generous sponsors, who now include Clearpath Robotics, Southwest Research Institute, GaiTech, and ARM!
http://roscon.ros.org/2016/#sponsors

We’d like to especially thank our Platinum and Gold Sponsors: Fetch Robotics, Clearpath Robotics, Intel, Southwest Research Institute, and Yujin Robot.

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)

robot_localization 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. robot_localization 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)

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)

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)

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 AUTOSAR, which will be necessary for software that’s usable in production vehicles.

Next up: Jerry Towler & Marc Alban (SwRI)

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

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

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.

Mirko Bordignon from Fraunhofer IPA opened the final ROSCon 2016 keynote by pointing out that ROS is still heavily focused on research and service robotics. This isn’t a bad thing, but with a little help, there’s an enormous opportunity for ROS to transform industrial robotics as well. Over the past few years. The ROS Industrial Consortium has grown into two international consortia (one in America and one in Europe), comprising over thirty members that provide financial and managerial support to the ROS-I community.

To help companies get more comfortable with the idea of using ROS in their robots, ROS-I holds frequent training sessions and other outreach events. “People out there are realizing that at least they can’t ignore ROS, and that they actually might benefit from it,” Bordignon says. And companies are benefiting from it, with ROS starting to show up in a variety of different industries in the form of factory floor deployments as well as products.

Bordignon highlights a few of the most interesting projects that the ROS-I community is working on at the moment, including a CAD to ROS workbench, getting ROS to work on PLCs, and integrating the OPC data protocol, which is common to many industrial systems.

Before going into deeper detail on ROS-I’s projects, Shaun Edwards from SwRI talks about how the fundamental idea for a ROS-I consortium goes back to one of their first demos. The demo was of a PR2 using 3D perception and intelligent path planning to pick up objects off of a table. “[Companies were] impressed by what they saw at Willow Garage, but they didn’t make the connection: that they could leverage that work,” Edwards explains. SwRI then partnered with Yaskawa to get the same software running on an industrial arm, “and this alone really sold industry on ROS being something to pay attention to,” says Edwards.

Since 2014, ROS-I has been refining a general purpose Calibration Toolbox for industrial robots. The goal is to streamline an otherwise time-consuming (and annoying) calibration process. This toolbox covers robot-to-camera calibration (with both stationary and mobile cameras), as well as camera-to-camera calibration. Over the next few months, ROS-I will be releasing templates for common calibration use cases to make it as easy as possible.

Path planning is another ongoing ROS-I project, as is ROS support for CANOpen devices (to enable IoT-type networking), and integrated motion planning for mobile manipulators. ROS-I actually paid the developers of the ROS mobile manipulation stack to help with this. “Leveraging the community this way, and even paying the community, is a really good thing, and I’d like to see more of it,” Edwards says.

To close things out, Edwards briefly touches on the future of ROS-I, including the seamless fusion of 3D scanning, intelligent planning, and dynamic manipulation, which is already being sponsored by Boeing and Caterpillar. If you’d like to get involved in ROS-I, they’d love for you to join them, and even if you’re not directly interested in industrial robotics, there are still plenty of opportunities to be part of a more inclusive and collaborative ROS ecosystem.

Next up: Kai von Szadkowski (University of Bremen)
Check out last week’s post: MoveIt! Strengths, Weaknesses, and Developer Insight

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

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.

Next up: Dave Coleman (University of Colorado Boulder)
Check out last week’s post: State of ROS 2

Today may be April 1st, but this is no April Fools’ Joke: ROSCon 2016 will take place in Seoul, South Korea between October 8th and 9th! We’re very excited to get the ROS community together again to share all of the exciting work that has happened over the last year. ROSCon will directly precede IROS, which is in nearby Daejeon, Korea this year. If you’re already planning to attend IROS, just tack on a couple extra days and join us in Seoul!

Stay tuned to the ROSCon 2016 website for updates and submission deadlines. We look forward to seeing you in Seoul later this year!

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.

Next up: Dirk Thomas, William Woodall (OSRF) & Esteve Fernandez
Check out last week’s post: Ralph Seulin of CNRS

Accepted students will participate in real-world software development,
contributing to robotics projects and engaging with the global robotics community, all while
getting paid.

Check out our GSoC site and don’t forget to visit our ideas page, which lists projects that we’re interested in. Feel free to ask questions and propose suggestions at gsoc@localhost. The student application period starts March 14th.

Get ready for a robotics coding summer!

Ruffin White, a graduate research assistant at the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines at Georgia Tech (and ex-OSRF intern), discusses how Linux containers can help manage some of these issues. A Linux container is a software package that lives somewhere in between a complete virtual machine and bare code. Using a service called Docker, you can wrap up code, distros, libraries, drivers, and all the other dependencies necessary for your code to function into portable containers that still use the underlying kernel on whatever they end up getting installed on. This allows the container to be very lightweight, while also providing adaptability to local infrastructure.

White gives three different demonstrations of how Docker containers can come in handy for robots in a ROS environment. In the first, he shows how in an educational context, you can use containers to provide a preset environment that can be safely experimented in without any risk. Second, for researchers, containers can allow you to easily test different algorithms, provides a way to publish code in a repeatable and reproducible way, and makes collaborative research much simpler. And finally, industry can take advantage of containers to deploy multiple nodes on different cloud services, or to manage entire swarms of robots at once.

If you want to give ROS a try inside Docker containers, the offical repo can be found at https://hub.docker.com/_/ros/.

ROSCon 2015 Hamburg: Day 1 – Ruffin White: ROS + Docker from OSRF on Vimeo.

Next up: Dejan Pangercic, Daniel Di Marco, and Arne Hamann (Robert Bosch)
Check out last week’s post: Morgan Quigley of OSRF

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.

Next up: Lorenz Meier & Roman Bapst of ETH Zurich and PX4
Check out last week’s post: Stefan Kohlbrecher of Technische Universitaet Darmstadt

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, Stefan 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.

Next up: Gary Servin of Creativa77
Check out last week’s post: Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical

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.

Next up: Stefan Kohlbrecher of Technische Universitaet Darmstadt
Check out last week’s post: OSRF’s Brian Gerkey

Gazebo 7 release

At the beginning of January, the we began to prepare for the release of Gazebo 7. This involved wrapping up a set of outstanding features and significant testing. On January 25th, Gazebo 7 was officially released. This version will have support for five years, and adds a variety of new and exciting features including a graphical model editor, torsional friction, wide angle camera sensor, and numerous performance improvements and bug fixes. Over the next year, we will focus on Gazebo’s user experience. To date, a lot of time has been spent perfecting physics and sensor simulation. This effort was vital for the Virtual Robotics Competition and other projects. Our focus now is to polish Gazebo into a tool that is more approachable by designers, engineers, students, and anyone who doesn’t feel comfortable using linux and/or a terminal.

Gazebo Tutorials

Documentation and support materials are extremely important, especially when using a complex system like Gazebo. First time users of Gazebo typically face a large learning curve that can be daunting. In an effort to reduce this learning curve, we have added new tutorials and restructured the tutorial system. A new section, called Guided, features tutorials that offer more structure. The first set of Guided tutorials are targeted to beginners. Over the next few months additional tutorials for intermediate and advanced users will be added.

Guided tutorials

ArduPilot Gazebo Plugin

Developers at DIY Drones have created a new ArduPilot plugin for Gazebo. Check out their blog post for more information. Their demo video, below, is an impressive demonstration of the ArduPilot plugin and Gazebo.

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.

Next up, Mark Shuttleworth from Canonical.

Eight years ago, Morgan Quigley, Eric Berger and Andrew Ng published a paper that was not about ROS. It was about STAIR, the STanford Artificial Intelligence Robot, which used a library called Switchyard to pass messages between software modules to perform complex manipulation tasks like stapler grasping. Switchyard was a purpose-built framework that was designed to be modular and robot-independent, and it was such a good idea that in 2009, “ROS: An Open-Source Robot Operating System” was presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Japan. As of this month, the paper introducing ROS has been cited 2,020 times, an increase of more than 50% over last year.

The popularity of one single paper is only a minor indicator of the popularity of the robot operating system that it introduced. At eight years old, ROS is growing faster than ever, and helping the robotics community to grow along with it. We’re especially excited to see how brand new startups have been taking advantage of the open source nature of ROS to help them develop useful, reliable robots that are creating entirely new markets. In 2015 alone, more than $150 million in VC funding (that we know of) was invested in businesses that utilize ROS.

Large, established companies have been taking more and more notice of ROS as well. At ROSCon this year, Fetch Robotics was joined as a platinum sponsor by Ubuntu, and a record number of gold sponsors included NVIDIA, Bosch, and Qualcomm and attendees from companies such as BMW, DJI, Intel and more. ROSCon 2015 was by far the largest conference we’ve ever had: it sold out weeks in advance.  Clearly next year we’re going to have to find a much bigger venue to make room for more attendees, more speakers, and more exhibitors.

Taking a look at how much our community has grown this year, it’s easy to see why ROSCon has become so popular: it’s a reflection of the enthusiasm and engagement of the ROS user base. In May 2015 alone, nearly nine million ROS packages were downloaded from over 70,000 unique IP addresses, and these numbers don’t even count mirrors. This suggests that ROS probably has hundreds of thousands of active users. We also have a very robust developer community: 1,840 people have contributed to ROS’ 10 million lines of code, averaging 20 commits per day. The ROS wiki has gotten 10% bigger since last year, and there are over 11,000 users on ROS Answers, a 32% increase over last year, with a total of more than 5,000 questions answered. It’s numbers like these that make us so confident in the long term future of ROS.

Counting ROS

Because of the nature of the ROS license, we actually don’t know how many users, robots, and developers there are utilizing ROS.  Many of the numbers that we are citing throughout are likely to be much larger.  For example, we specifically know of approximately 80 types of robots using ROS, but almost every day we hear about new ones.  And not every company using ROS discloses so publicly, so our estimates on venture capital investment can be better characterized as lower bounds than estimates.

If you’re not part of the ROS community yet, there’s never been a better time to get involved. Even if you don’t have experience with robots or programming, there’s a wide variety of low-cost robots and helpful online tutorials that can get you started, and we’re also delighted to announce (just in time for the holidays!) that O’Reilly Media has published “Programming Robots with ROS: A Practical Introduction to the Robot Operating System,” by Morgan Quigley, Brian Gerkey, and Bill Smart, which will take you from zero to ROS expert in just 448 pages.

Learning ROS will allow you to do all kinds of cool stuff with more than 80 robotic platforms. You can choose from the capable, affordable TurtleBot, one of the many sophisticated humanoid robots that competed in the DARPA Robotics Challenge, or even NASA’s Robonaut, currently undergoing testing on the International Space Station. Robots powered by ROS are everywhere, and here are just a few of them:

For full frame clips see the long version of the montage.

Of course, we have no idea how many robots are actually running ROS, or how many people or companies are using it, because ROS is open source and completely free. We’re often surprised to learn that cutting edge robots that we’re already familiar with are powered by ROS, as when BMW announced at ROSCon that they’ve been using ROS in their autonomous cars for the past few years. We weren’t at all surprised to hear why BMW chose ROS for its autonomous driving research, though: they appreciate its popularity, its stability and reliability based on a large user base, the fact that it makes it easy to collaborate, and its open source nature.

As the ROS community has grown, various special interest groups have organized to promote ROS for specific application domains. The ROS Industrial Consortium is one such group.  ROS-I is a software library that builds on ROS and leverages its power and flexibility to control manufacturing automation equipment including industrial robot arms. It is supported by the 36-member organizations comprised of companies such as 3M, ABB, BMW, Ford, Boeing, Siemens and more.  Representatives from Boeing, Caterpillar, Yaskawa and more speak on behalf of ROS and ROS-I in this video.

2016 is poised to be the biggest year ever for ROS, and we’d like to highlight two things that are worth getting particularly excited about. The first is ROS 2.0, which we’ve been developing for the past few years. ROS 2 will support the growth of the ROS community by making it much easier to work with small embedded systems, teams of multiple robots, and robots that require real-time control. We’d also like to make sure you’re familiar with Robotics Fast Track (RFT), which is  a program that we’re working on with DARPA. It’s an easy way for you to get government funding for your awesome robotics ideas without having to give up any of your IP, and absolutely anyone can apply.

We write these anniversary posts to help give you a sense of how ROS has a whole has been doing over the past year, but we’d certainly encourage you to find out for yourself, by getting involved. Write or edit a Wiki page. Answer a question on ROS Answers. Come to ROSCon. And, when you’re ready, think about helping to maintain ROS itself, or even contributing a brand new ROS package. OSRF is doing great, but the long-term success of ROS depends on all of the incredibly awesome ROS users themselves. If you’re already an active part of the ROS community, we can’t thank you enough, and if you’re not, think about it: you can help ROS grow and thrive for eight more years, and beyond.

Let’s talk about robots. In the near future, robots will learn how to do more and more of the things that we humans are used to doing ourselves. Watching the progress of robotic technology over the last several years has caused a wild and so far mostly theoretical economic panic about the future of humans in the workplace. But despite the flood of articles suggesting that the human worker is doomed, robots are almost certainly not going to take your job anytime soon.

The complete post is here.

Open Source Robotics Foundation is joining DARPA and Tandem National Security Innovations on the road to spread the word about DARPA’s Robotics Fast Track Program. We’re proud to support the opportunity for startups and roboticists to receive $150,000 to build a robot prototype.

Join us in Seattle, Redwood City, Livermore, San Diego (or all four!) to learn more about the innovative program designed to make it easier to get projects funded in weeks, not months or years by the Pentagon’s leading advanced research lab. Whether you’re a roboticist, technologist, or entrepreneur, you’ll want to join us for this rare opportunity. The events will begin with an informational session to discuss the program followed by the opportunity for attendees to meet privately with representatives from DARPA, OSRF and TandemNSI to ask specific questions about individual projects. Food and drink will be provided at each of our free events so come out and join us.

Seattle Event Details

Date/Time: Nov. 17, 2015 from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.
Location: The Maker’s Space (92 Lenora Street, Seattle, WA 98121)
Register Here

Northern California Event Details

Lunch in Livermore
Date/Time: Nov. 18, 2015 from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Location: i-GATE Innovation Hub (2324 Second St, Livermore, CA 94550)
Register Here

Evening in Redwood City
Date/Time: Nov. 18, 2015 from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.
Location: TechShop Mid Peninsula (2415 Bay Road, Redwood City, CA 94063)
Register Here

San Diego Event Details

Date/Time: Nov. 19, 2015 from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.
Location: The Basement — UC San Diego (9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla, CA 92093)
Register Here

To learn even more about the program, the Robotics Fast Track website has specifics on how to apply, and more details on the technologies that DARPA seeks. We look forward to seeing you at one of the West Coast events!

This year’s ROSCon is nearly upon us. If you haven’t yet made plans to get yourself to Hamburg, then you are out of luck as this year’s ROSCon has sold out. The good news is that we are live streaming ROSCon presentations free of charge, courtesy of Qualcomm.

Click here for the live stream beginning 9:00 a.m. CEST, 2015, 12:00 a.m. PDT or 3:00 a.m. EDT on October 3, 2015.

All sessions will also be recorded and made available for viewing in the near future. Follow @OSRFoundation for announcements about their availability.

A final thank you to Platinum Sponsors Fetch Robotics and Ubuntu; Gold Sponsors 3D Robotics, Bosch, Clearpath Robotics, GaiTech, Magazino, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Rethink Robotics, Robotis, Robotnik, ROS-Industrial, Shadow Robot Company, SICK and Synapticon; and Silver Sponsors Erle Robotics and Northwestern University, McCormick School of Engineering.

Check out the program here.

If you’re attending in-person, we look forward to seeing you soon!

As Gazebo currently employs the Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine (OGRE), an OGRE-based implementation has been added to the ignition-rendering library. Additionally, a render-engine using NVIDIA’s OptiX ray-tracing engine has also been implemented. The current OptiX-based render-engine employs simple ray-tracing techniques, but will employ physically based path-tracing techniques in the future to generate photo-realistic imagery.

The following videos give an overview of the libraries’ current capabilities:

Each plane – a styrofoam wing with a 56” wingspan – was equipped with a Pixhawk autopilot running a modified version of the open-source Ardupilot firmware and an ODroid u3 “payload” computer running ROS Indigo. The payload used autopilot_bridge (similar to mavros) to bridge between serial communications with the autopilot and ROS messages and services. A network node bridged ROS communications with a lightweight UDP-based protocol that allowed aircraft to share their pose and status with one another and to receive commands from the ground.

Also residing on the payload was a set of controller nodes that could “drive” the plane by sending updated target latitude-longitude-altitude commands to the autopilot. Controllers were individually activated by a state machine, based on commands from the ground. The controller used during the fifty-plane flight was a follower controller. A single ground operator commanded two sets of 25 planes each to configure themselves into leader-follower formations; planes would determine a leader based on highest altitude (which was deconflicted at the start of the flight). The leader would then proceed along a predefined racetrack, and all followers, listening to the broadcast position of the leader, would track its path while remaining at their designated altitudes.

A detailed writeup of the flight test is posted at DIY Drones and more information on the research project can be found at the ARSENL website.

• LiftDragPlugin: This plugin simulates the forces on an object immersed in a fluid and applies the forces to the object’s links directly. In particular, the phenomena of lift and drag are instrumental to underwater and aerodynamic vehicles. You can learn more about this plugin in its own tutorial.
• BuoyancyPlugin: This plugin simulates buoyancy by generating a force opposing gravity exerted on an object immersed in a fluid. Check out this tutorial to learn more about how to use this plugin.

We have also created other resources that might be useful for your simulations:

• Cessna C-172 model: Control surfaces fully adjustable via plugins.
• Submarine models: A set of basic propeller-based submarines with different buoyancy properties.

In the next Gazebo release, we will also make available two different world files containing simple environments for the Cessna and submarine models.

We were especially excited to see widespread use of both ROS and Gazebo during the two-day competition. Walking through the team garage area during the finals, we saw many screens showing rviz and other ROS tools, and even one with a browser open to ROS Answers (some last-minute debugging, we assume).

We talked with several teams who used Gazebo in their software development and testing, including teams using robots other than the Atlas that we modeled for the VRC. In the post-DRC workshop on Sunday, both first-place Team KAIST and third-place Tartan Rescue discussed their use of Gazebo, in particular for developing solutions to fall-recovery and vehicle egress. That’s one of the reasons we work on Gazebo: to give roboticists the tools they need to safely develop robot software to handle unsafe situations, without risk to people or hardware.

Based on our observations at the competition and communications with team members, out of the 23 DRC Finals teams, we count 18 teams using ROS and 14 teams using Gazebo. We couldn’t be happier to see such impact from open source robot software!

OSRF is pleased to welcome Frantisek Durovsky, Konstantinos Chatzilygeroudis, Mykola Dolhyi, Nima Shafii, Ratnesh Madaan and Steve Ataucuri, our 2015 students for the Google Summer of Code!

Frantisek is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Robotics, Technical University Kosice, Slovakia. His main focus is on industrial robotics, currently working on his thesis titled “Human-Robot collaboration in manufacturing processes”. He is also a member of SmartRoboticSystems developers group which aims to popularize ROS in the region of Czech Republic and Slovakia. This summer he will work on ROS-Profinet wrapper, in order to make world’s most advanced Industrial Ethernet available to ROS community.

Konstantinos Chatzilygeroudis recently received his Diploma from Computer Engineering and Informatics Department, University of Patras and he is a member of Robotics Group of University of Patras. In his diploma thesis “Navigation of Humanoid Robot NAO in Unknown Space” he dealt with humanoid robot kinematics, dynamics, SLAM and motion planning (bipedal locomotion). As a member of Robotics Group Konstantinos is researching path planning for mobile robots using collision aware techniques. As a GSoC 2015 intern, Konstantinos will focus on adding more features to the core library of the Ignition Robotics Transport Library.

Mykola Dolhyi is pursuing a Bachelor of Mathematics at Taras Shevchenko University. He is in constant search of new cool technologies. Mykola has studied computer vision, machine learning, heterogeneous parallel computing. He is particularly interested in cryptography, computer graphics, game development and flying drones. Mykola will be working on the camera sensor part of Gazebo, and maybe some other improvements in graphics realism and quality.

Nima Shafii is a Ph.D. candidate of informatics engineering at Porto University and a member of the Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science Laboratory (LIACC), Porto, Portugal. He is currently working on his thesis on humanoid robot locomotion and is interested in developing autonomous soccer humanoid robots. His goal is improving locomotion approaches allowed a humanoid robot to perform soccer skills faster and more robust. During the past five years, He
has actively participated in events such as RoboCup. Nima will be working on Gazebo simulator in order to adapt it to simulate RoboCup soccer environment.

Ratnesh Madaan graduated this May from Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee with a B.Tech. in Mechanical Engineering. This summer, he is working with ROS-I on combining the capabilities of Descartes and MoveIt! by developing a hybrid motion planner to handle both free space and semi-constrained trajectory segments. He is deferring his Masters program offers to gain experience in different sub-fields of robotics this year via internships or other opportunities, in order to be better prepared for the Fall 2016 cohort. In his free time, he likes to go on impromptu cycling excursions, sketch sporadically and listen (and lazily think of getting back) to music.

Steve is pursuing his studies in Electronics and Automatization at Cesca Institute. He got his B.S in Computer Science from San Pablo University in 2013. Steve has been focusing his research on Reinforcement learning to a robot soccer team. He is interested in machine learning, image processing techniques, embedded systems and drones. At OSRF, Steve will be building drivers to integrate Neuronal interfaces for ROS/Gazebo simulator.

We are excited to extend the intern family at OSRF and work with Frantisek, Konstantinos, Mykola, Nima, Ratnesh and Steve, in the coming months. We look forward to their contributions this summer!

Join OSRF at the biggest robotics event of the year, the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Finals! If you’re looking for some excitement on June 5 and 6, head on over to the Fairplex in Pomona, Calif. for two days of free robotics competition and demonstrations. OSRF will be at the Expo in full force with 4 interactive demos and more stickers than you have surfaces to stick them on.

The DRC Finals will be divided into two parts. The Technology Expo will offer dozens of interactive exhibits and demonstrations, and the competition Grandstands will provide an excellent view as 25 robotics organizations from around the world compete for $3.5 million in prizes.

We’ve worked on the DARPA Robotics Challenge since it kicked off in 2012. In June 2013, we helped host the DARPA Virtual Robotics Challenge which awarded 8 Boston Dynamics Atlas robots to the most successful competitors. In December 2013, we participated in the Expo at the DRC Trials in Florida. It has been thrilling to take part in such an impressive, impactful robotics program, and we can’t wait to witness the grand conclusion in just one week.

If you’re in the Pomona area next Friday and Saturday, we’d love to see you at the OSRF booth (#14). Just hang a left as you enter the Expo area, and you’ll see us a few booths down on the right side. We’ll have a handful of demos for you to check out, including simulated foosball and drone flying, a motion capture system with haptic feedback, and a bale of Turtlebots you can drive around.

For more information, check out the DRC Finals website: http://www.theroboticschallenge.org/.

Here’s a map of the Expo area:

We’re excited to announce that OSRF and BIT Systems are seeking innovative and revolutionary robotics projects for the Robotics Fast Track (RFT) effort, sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The goals of Robotics Fast Track are:

1. Enable rapid, cost-effective development of new robotics capabilities designed to respond to, and even anticipate, quickly evolving needs in space, maritime, ground, and air operations. RFT will focus on the development of groundbreaking robotic hardware and software by funding novel approaches as well as creative adaptations of existing technologies.
2. Achieve breakthrough capabilities in less time and at a fraction of the cost typical of government-supported robotic development processes by engaging highly agile organizations and individuals who traditionally have not worked with the U.S. government.

Learn more and apply at rft.osrfoundation.org!

The R4SIM workshop is motivated by the need for robotics simulators that

1. lower the barriers to entering robotics research,
2. provide a means to realistically and comprehensively simulate systems in conditions, or at scales, that would be unfeasible or impossible to test experimentally, and
3. enable efficient and reliable transition to and from hardware experiments.

Check out the workshop, call for papers, and important dates at http://r4sim.com/.

And a full CFP is located here:
http://www.r4sim.com/R4SIM-Final.pdf

Let me get the basic statistics out of the way. It is widely acknowledged and reported that women are grossly underrepresented in the STEM fields. The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economics and Statistics Administration (ESA) reported in 2011 that women hold less than 25% of the country’s STEM jobs. Women comprise a mere 17% of Google’s technology workforce; Apple sits at 20%. There are many factors at play, from what the ESA describes as the lack of “family-friendly flexibility in the STEM fields,” to gender discrimination and stereotyping, to the shortage of strong female role models.

It is the latter point that I wish to touch on first, because indeed, I found my niche in robotics due in large part to the outstanding mentor I found in Leila Takayama. I met Leila during an internship at Willow Garage, back when I was struggling to apply a psychology degree to a burgeoning interest in badass robots. I began at Willow as an operations intern. I did everything from inventory management, to lunch clean-up, to multimeter measurements on robot stress tests, to light switch labeling. As much as label making satisfies my deepest desire for order, I saw everyone around me designing and building the PR2. At that time, the PR2 was arguably the world’s most sophisticated personal robot. I wanted in on the action. That’s about as far as I got, though – a keen interest in robots – until Leila joined and introduced me to Human-Robot Interaction.

Without a doubt, it was my experience as Leila’s research assistant, her advice and encouragement, and the challenges she emboldened me to take on, that opened my eyes to how I could make a place for myself in the world of robotics. With Leila as my role model and mentor, I conducted HRI research, co-authored a paper, gradually become comfortable surrounded by a nearly all-male engineering team, and shed the sometimes crippling doubt around whether I had what it took to work in a highly technical field. Witnessing Leila successfully navigate this male-dominated industry cemented in me the confidence I needed to pursue a career in robotics, not only as a woman, but as a designer and researcher.

At Leila’s urging, I applied and was accepted to Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction masters program. This turned out to be the second most influential factor in getting me to where I am now, co-founder and Lead UX Designer at OSRF. I mention this because, while UX researchers and designers are now in high demand at technology companies, that path would have been unknown to me without Leila’s example.
The message here is twofold: find a mentor within robotics, as I did with Leila; and realize there can be more to a STEM career than only engineering. There is enormous opportunity for women and researchers and designers; there are countless ways for women to kick ass in the robotics field. Don’t misunderstand me: be an engineer if that’s where your passion lies, but know that there’s more to robotics than engineering.

As robots become increasingly commonplace in our everyday lives, the need for robotics designers and researchers (and engineers) is growing, opening up vast opportunities to shape how robots function and behave, and how we in turn perceive and interact with them. Just one simple example: What should happen during a robot-human encounter in a narrow hallway? Numerous social norms govern this scenario on how to negotiate passage when only humans are involved. Bringing such an encounter to a satisfactory and natural conclusion when a robot is involved requires thoroughly technical as well as social and user experience expertise. Who knows, maybe having a female perspective in this research means that robots will never be guilty of manslamming.

For robots to weave seamlessly into daily life, we must design and construct them with a keen understanding of the preference differences not just between genders, but within male and female populations as well. Robots need to appear non-threatening yet capable, be able to accommodate personal space preferences, and provide the desired amount of information with the communication style or tone most effective with its current audience. Robots designed and built exclusively by men, or exclusively by women, will fail in some regards to meet the needs of half their users. If we wish for robotic technologies to flourish, it would be foolhardy to accept the STEM fields’ gender ratio status quo.

Robotics is special among technical areas in that the breadth of required specialties is exceptionally broad. Without an understanding of technical, psychological, cognitive, and social factors robotics will stay locked in limited industrial application areas. Such a limitation would be a enormous opportunity lost.

This service is something that we’ve heard requested many times, especially from our industry users, and we’re excited that Clearpath is going to offer it. If you’re looking for help or advice in using ROS on a current or upcoming project, get in touch with Clearpath.

Stay tuned for previews of what we’ll be showing off at the DRC Finals Expo…

That ROS support has now been promoted into an official MATLAB toolbox, called the Robotics System Toolbox. You can work in MATLAB with any ROS-enabled robot, simulator, or log data. Check out their overview video!

Check out our GSoC site and don’t forget to visit our ideas page, which lists projects that we’re interested in. Feel free to ask
questions and propose suggestions at gsoc@localhost. The
student application period starts March 16th. Get ready for a robotics
coding summer!

We’ll work with Dronecode to make our tools even more useful for UAV projects. We’ll also bring together the general robotics community and the aerial robotics community. Both groups have valuable tools and capabilities which can be shared, to everyone’s benefit.

We look forward to getting more involved with the UAV community and seeing some amazing open source flying robots.

Health care workers are at the highest risk of exposure when working in close proximity to infected patients. Even the use of personal protective equipment still exposes workers to considerable risk of infection. These risks are due to both faulty practice and extreme conditions, especially in harsh locations such as West Africa where high temperatures and humidity present real operational challenges. The use of intuitive teleoperation interfaces will enable health care workers to remotely operate robots (such as Baxter) to perform significant portions of their jobs from a safe distance. Examples of potential tasks include patient monitoring, equipment moving, and contaminated material disposal. This will allow health care workers to provide needed care while maintaining the important patient-health care worker interaction, all while making their jobs safer and more tolerable.

Here is an example of a task that Baxter will help investigate, as performed by the PR2:

As the organization maintaining Gazebo, OSRF has been tasked with extending Gazebo to simulate prosthetic hands and test environments, and develop both graphical and programming interfaces to the hands. OSRF is officially releasing a new version of Gazebo for use by HAPTIX participants. Highlights of the new release include support for OptiTrack motion capture system; the NVIDIA 3D vision system; numerous teleoperation options including the Razer Hydra, SpaceNavigator, mouse, mixer board and keyboard; a high-dexterity prosthetic arm; and programmatic control of the simulated arm using Linux, Windows and MATLAB. More information and tutorials are available at the Gazebo website. Here’s an overview video:

“Our track record of success in simulation as part of the DARPA Robotics Challenge makes OSRF a natural partner for the HAPTIX program,” according to John Hsu, Chief Scientist at Open Source Robotics Foundation. “Simulation of prosthetic hands and the accompanying GUI will significantly enhance the HAPTIX program’s ability to help restore more natural functionality to wounded service members.”

Gazebo is an open source simulator that makes it possible to rapidly test algorithms, design robots, and perform regression testing using realistic scenarios. Gazebo provides users with a robust physics engine, high-quality graphics, and convenient programmatic and graphical interfaces. Gazebo was the simulation environment for the VRC, the Virtual Robotics Challenge stage of the DARPA Robotics Challenge.

This project also marks the first time Windows and MATLAB users can interact with Gazebo, thanks to our new cross-platform transport library. The scope is limited to the HAPTIX project, however plans are in motion to bring the entire Gazebo package to Windows.

Teams participating on HAPTIX will have access to a customized version of Gazebo that the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory Modular Prosthetic Limb (MPL) developed under the DARPA Revolutionizing Prosthetics program, as well as representative physical therapy objects used in clinical research environments.

More details on HAPTIX can be found in the DARPA announcement.

Ying is enthusiastic and excited to see how robotics is going to change the world, just as the computer revolution does!

She is excited about open source technology and user experience because she believes that machines are here to make life easier for everyone around the world, not the opposite! Along this line of thought, she hopes one day to make robotic Rubik’s cubes which solve themselves while humans just sit back and relax.

Here’s Victor to tell you about it:

This prototype has several caveats, most importantly that system performance is limited to ~3 Hz at the moment due to the UDP implementation of the underlying RTOS, but we expect that to improve drastically over time. We are hoping that this work is a starting point for the next generation of ROS-compatible sensors and actuators: robot parts that, out of the box, plug into an Ethernet network and interoperate in the ROS environment as first class participants.

You can continue to donate to OSRF at any time, and of course we’re always interested to talk with new corporate or government sponsors.

Another way to support OSRF, if you’re an Amazon customer, is to login to Amazon Smile and select us (Open Source Robotics Foundation) as your charity (learn more).

And what’s the coolest kind of embedded, connected, mobile device? A robot, of course. Here at OSRF, we’ve been working with Ubuntu to ensure that ROS will be ready to use on Snappy and we’re making plans for a ROS / Snappy store. You’ll be able to write, share, and run ROS-based Snappy apps for your favorite robots (check out an early prototype).

We’ve supported and relied on Ubuntu Linux since the beginning of the ROS project, and we’re excited to be part of this transition to a new Ubuntu-based app ecosystem.

We’re happy to announce that OSRF will be an advisor to the Eyes of Things (EoT) project, which was recently selected by the European Commission in one of the first batches of the ICT-H2020 Framework Programme. The EoT project brings together eight European partners: VISILAB (Spain, Project Coordinator), Movidius (Ireland), Awaiba (Portugal), DFKI (Germany), Thales (France), Fluxguide (Austria), nViso (Switzerland) and Evercam (Ireland).

The 3.7M€ project envisages a computer vision platform that can be used both standalone and embedded into more complex systems, particularly for wearable applications, robotics, home products, and surveillance. The core hardware will be based on a system-on-chip (SoC) that has been designed for maximum performance of the always-demanding vision applications while keeping the lowest energy consumption. This will allow always on and truly mobile vision processing. Software will be developed in parallel to this design, at both the low and middleware levels, and also for a number of demonstrators. The demonstrators span applications in surveillance, wearable configuration and embedded into a household item. Eyes of Things will have a duration of three years, starting in January 2015. The kick-off meeting will be January 27th, 2015.

Esteve holds a MSc in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics and M.S.E. and B.S.E. in Computer Engineering, and has been a professional developer for over 10 years. He is a member of the Apache Software Foundation and a frequent speaker at open source conferences, such as PyCon US and EuroPython.

Overall, Esteve found in robotics the perfect excuse for playing with Lego in his 30s without getting weird looks.

We couldn’t be happier with the size and breadth of the collaborative community that we’ve built together, and we’re grateful to everyone in the community for the roles that you’ve played.

You won’t be surprised to hear that it costs money to run OSRF. We employ a small team of amazing individuals, we operate an office in the Bay Area, and we run a suite of online services on which the community depends.

Since our founding, OSRF has enjoyed generous financial support from government agencies and private industry, for which we’re very grateful. We hope and anticipate that that support will continue in the future. But now, as we approach the end of OSRF’s third year, we’re trying something new: asking you, our users, for support.

If you rely on ROS and/or Gazebo in your lab, your startup company, your weekend projects, or elsewhere, please consider donating to OSRF. Your donation will support our people and infrastructure so that we can spend (even) more time developing and maintaining the software and services on which you depend.

As one example, if everyone who visits the ROS wiki between now and the end of the year donates just $2, we’ll have our costs covered for next year to manage, update, and host all of our online services, including the wiki. Donations in any amount are welcome. Give more, and we can do more.

Donate to OSRF today.

Thank you for your support.

Contributions to the Open Source Robotics Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, will be used at its discretion for its charitable purposes. Such donations are tax-deductible in the U.S. to the extent permitted by law.

(You might recall that we also recently built the open electronics and firmware for a new robot hand.)

Rachel got her B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Chicago. As an undergrad, she worked as a research assistant at the Chicago Language Modeling Lab. With a background in linguistics, Rachel is especially interested in machine learning, natural language processing and all things computational linguistics. As on OPW intern, she will be working on a path planning algorithm for Gazebo. You can follow Rachel’s progress on her blog.

Welcome!

Look at all these enthusiastic robot nerds! Even Baxter got dressed up. Happy Halloween from everyone at the Open Source Robotics Foundation!

If you’re coming to visit, note the new location.

Tashwin developed a tool for downloading data from the OpenStreetMap database to produce a corresponding world file for Gazebo. Tashwin focused on importing roads, traffic signals, and buildings.

In addition, she provided support for a new shape type: the extruded polyline. The two-dimensional shape is defined with a series of points that can be extruded to form a solid object. This can be very useful for visualizing buildings and similar constructions.

References:
www.gazebosim.org

Repositories:
https://bitbucket.org/osrf/gazebo
https://bitbucket.org/tkhurana/gazebo
https://bitbucket.org/tkhurana/sdformat

Last week, we said goodbye to the old office by raising a glass, lowering a flag, and reminiscing about the last couple of years. (We’ll post pictures of the new place after we’ve finished unpacking.)