Most of the interns and mentors spent a sunny day in San Francisco together. Our first stop was at Golden Gate park, where we fired up the grill to cook some tasty tri-tip and veggies before exercising our memory playing “Merci”.
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!
Every year, we’re impressed and humbled by the enthusiastic support we get from the ROS community. This year was certainly no exception. After ROSCon 2015 sold out weeks in advance, we knew we had to find an even larger venue for this year’s conference in Korea. The Conrad Hotel in Seoul turned out to be not quite big enough, however, as ROSCon 2016 sold out anyway. We hosted more than 450 attendees (a 20% increase over last year), 44% of whom came from the Asia Pacific region. Visitors from China now make up the second-largest group accessing the ROS wiki, and five out of the top eight countries using the wiki are in Asia Pacific as well. This level of engagement is one of the reasons we decided to host ROSCon in Korea in the first place, and Asia as a whole is a big part of why ROS package downloads are up by 150% over the last year.
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.
Do you want to spend the summer coding on Gazebo or ROS? OSRF has been accepted for GSoC and we are looking for talented students who want to participate as remote interns.
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!
The Advanced Robotic Systems Engineering Lab at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA recently flew fifty small autonomous planes together using ROS.
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.
As another result of the exciting DARPA Robotics Challenge, Gazebo has improved its capabilities in the aeronautics and hydrodynamics fields. We expect these changes to benefit the way UAVs and UUVs are simulated and we hope to contribute more novel developments in this area. OSRF has developed two new Gazebo plugins:
We have also created other resources that might be useful for your simulations:
In the next Gazebo release, we will also make available two different world files containing simple environments for the Cessna and submarine models.
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!