In a major milestone for the open source robotics community, we’re proud to announce that we’re opening our first overseas office in Singapore. More details will be available soon, but Open Robotics is joining the growing ranks of enthusiastic ROS and Gazebo developers in Singapore. We’re honored that this development was mentioned by Senior Minister of State Koh Poh Koon in his speech at the opening of the new LaunchPad Robotics Centre.

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.

Fast Company just announced its annual ranking of the world’s Most Innovative Companies for 2018, honoring leading enterprises and rising newcomers that exemplify the best in business and innovation. While we can’t lay claim to the overall number 1 spot on the list this year (Apple got that one) – we can lay claim to the top spot in the robotics category:

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.

Last week we all went to see the San Jose Sharks play the Las Vegas Golden Knights in the Shark Tank (officially known as the SAP Center):

Despite the fact that in the end the home team lost, a good time was had by all:

And our own Deanna Hood made an impressive showing in a shark outfit…

…that got her onto the Jumbotron!

We’re honored and excited to share the news of renewed support for our work from Toyota Research Institute (TRI):

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!

This week we were happy to receive a visit from team Fireworks of Lynbrook High School in nearby San Jose.

These young women compete in the FIRST Tech Challenge, in which middle and high school students build, program, and control robots to play a game that involves a variety of mobility and manipulation challenges.

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!

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

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

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

The results are in, and the ROSCon 2017 program has been posted!

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!

Our own Tully Foote and Morgan Quigley will be leading our contingent to ICRA 2017. The event runs May 29 to June 3 in Singapore.

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.

As we announced back in September, we have created the Open Source Robotics Corporation (OSRC), a subsidiary of the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF). OSRC is a taxable subsidiary that supports the goals of its parent, OSRF, and by extension the global robotics community.

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.

We’re excited to announce that registration for ROSCon 2017 is now open:

Register now!

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

It’s been a while since we took a break to just have some fun together, so we took the whole company out Wednesday to spend the day together. We started in the morning at The Crucible, an amazing industrial arts studio in Oakland. Some of us were making glass fused mosaic tiles:

while others learned MIG welding:

All that work came together into a project that we’ll show off after it’s done cooking in the kiln.

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.

We’re excited to announce that we are now accepting presentation proposals for ROSCon 2017! Please see the call for proposals for more information and then submit your proposal. The deadline is June 25, 2017.

We are happy to announce that Qualifier 3 is now open for the Agile Robotics for Industrial Automation Competition (ARIAC)!

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

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

and here:

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

We’re pleased to welcome Steven! Ragnarok! Steven! is excited to be contributing to the tools, documentation, and infrastructure that power ROS. In the best timeline he’ll be sipping cold brew coffee and writing software with his feet in a stream. If you can’t find him there, check under a tree or at the desk he shares with a cat who hasn’t quite learned the meaning of sharing. His favorite fictional robots are Tom Servo and Robo.

We’re pleased to welcome Shane Loretz! Shane is excited to help create open source software that enables others to make the world a better place, or at least make better robots.

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.

Save the date: we’re happy to announce that ROSCon 2017 will be held September 21-22, 2017 at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver, Canada. IROS 2017 will be held at the same venue September 24-28, so plan to attend both of these great events!

Stay tuned for more information on ROSCon 2017.

We’re happy to welcome Chris Lalancette to the team! Prior to joining OSRF, Chris worked for on both Open Source software and robotics software. He’s excited to combine the spirit of Open Source and the interesting application of robotics at OSRF.

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.

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

Following an exciting weekend, we bid farewell to ROSCon 2016 in Seoul. It was record-breaking in every way, with over 450 attendees and a 60% increase over last year in sponsorship. Thanks to everyone for coming and for your support! Stay tuned for details on the next event. We anticipate posting videos of the presentations by October 20.

Photo credit: Evan Ackerman

Fundamentally, robotics is about helping people. Robots help us manufacture things, help us build things, and help make our lives easier and more convenient. As robotic systems increase in sophistication and capability, they’re starting to help people more directly, in elder care, rehabilitation centers, and hospitals. In the near future, robotics will become even more tightly integrated with humanity, to the point where cybernetics will be able to restore function to people with disabilities. In particular, amputee military personnel are the focus of one such program.

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.

[Cross-posted from the ROS blog.]

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.