Open Robotics

Powering the world's robots

Blog

ROSCon 2017: Early Registration Deadline August 1st

by

The ROSCon registration rates increase next Tuesday, August 1st! Register now at: https://roscon2017.eventbrite.com/ to get the early registration discount.

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

Filed Under:

Simulated Car Demo

by

We are excited to show off a simulation of a Prius in Mcity using ROS Kinetic and Gazebo 8. ROS enabled the simulation to be developed faster by using existing software and libraries. The vehicle’s throttle, brake, steering, and transmission are controlled by publishing to a ROS topic. All sensor data is published using ROS, and can be visualized with RViz.

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.

Celebrating 9 Years of ROS!

by

From ros.org

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!

roscon-group-thumb.png

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.

commits_by_year_month.png

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

hour_of_day.png

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.

Filed Under:

Bosch Research and Technology Center Joins Forces with Open Source Robotics Foundation to Advance the Development of ROS

by

Bosch Underwrites Full-Time Developer for ROS 2 Research

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.”

Filed Under:

ROSCon 2016: Proposal deadline July 8th and venue information

by

With just over 3 months to go before ROSCon 2016, we have some important announcements:

* 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.

Filed Under:

Kai von Szadkowski (University of Bremen): Phobos — Robot Model Development on Steroids

by

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

 

mantis

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Dave Coleman (University of Colorado Boulder): MoveIt! Strengths, Weaknesses, and Developer Insight

by

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

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

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

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

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

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

Improving the TurtleBot learning experience using simulation

by

During her Outreachy internship at Open Source Robotics Foundation, Nadya Ampilogova worked on a TurtleBot User Experience project.

The goal was to extend learn.turtlebot.com with lessons taking advantage of the simulation environment available in Gazebo. The use of robot simulation instead of a physical robot makes the tutorials accessible to a larger audience. All examples are with TurtleBot because it is a common way to start learning robotics. Many universities use the TurtleBot when teaching introductory robotics courses. In creating the lessons, Nadya focused on making the content engaging and accessible by integrating images and videos. The topics include how to install software, setup tools, write your first program to control a TurtleBot and lots more. Upon completion of this tutorial you will be able to create a TurtleBot application and test it in simulation.

The result of the project is twenty lessons about TurtleBot in simulation. They cover not only basic features but also give a brief overview of more complicated subjects. This tutorial makes studying robotics easier for people who may not have access to a real robot all of the time but who have a computer that can run the simulator.

You can find the tutorial on learn.turtlebot.com. This internship was a part of the Outreachy Program. You can read more about Nadya’s internship on her blog.

OSRF is in Google Summer of Code, version 2015!

by

Accepted students will participate in real-world software development,
contributing to robotics projects like Gazebo, ROS, and Ignition
Transport, and engaging with the global robotics community, all while
getting paid. As a bonus, this year we also offer ROS-Industrial
projects.

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!

Open Source Robotics Foundation to Extend ROS Support to Qualcomm Snapdragon Processors

by

Roboticists Now Able to Incorporate System-On-A-Chip Capabilities in Robot Designs and Applications

September 12, 2014 — MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA — Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) today announced plans to extend the capabilities of ROS to Qualcomm ® Snapdragon™ 600  processors, a product of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. (QTI), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated. Today’s announcement is made in conjunction with ROSCon 2014, the annual ROS Developer Conference.  ROSCon runs from Sept. 12-13 in Chicago, IL.  More information on the event is at http://roscon.ros.org/2014/

Via this agreement, OSRF will create and subsequently support a ROS release for Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 processors for both the Linux and Android operating systems.  OSRF will test, refine, and fully integrate support for the ARM instruction set architecture into ROS development efforts.  Once complete, OSRF will perform ongoing maintenance to generally support ROS on Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 processors.

The benefit to the worldwide robotics community working on the lower-power ARM chips means that robots can be smaller, more efficient, and have a longer battery life.

“As adoption of ROS continues to increase, our developer community wants to incorporate the latest computing platforms,” says Brian Gerkey, CEO of OSRF.  “Given the intersection between robotics and mobile and embedded systems, we believe that offering Snapdragon’s SoC capabilities to our users will be a big hit.”

“Qualcomm Technologies is proud to join OSRF and the ROS community to create an official, supported release for Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 processors,” said Matt Grob, executive vice president and CTO, Qualcomm.  “We’re excited about the potential for future innovation and invention in the robotics community with the combination of ROS and Qualcomm Snapdragon processors.”

ROS (for “Robot Operating System”) is a collection of tools and libraries that simplify the task of creating and programming robotic platforms and applications.  ROS is overseen by OSRF, who make the OS freely available to any and all users via open source licenses.  Since its introduction in 2007, ROS has grown to become the de facto OS for roboticists all over the world.

Availability

ROS for Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 processors will be available on the Linux OS and is anticipated to be available in Q4 2014 and on the Android OS in the first half of 2015. For more information on Qualcomm Snapdragon processors, please visit, https://www.qualcomm.com/#/products/snapdragon

About The Open Source Robotics Foundation

The Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) is an independent non-profit organization founded by members of the global robotics community. The mission of OSRF is to support the development, distribution, and adoption of open source software for use in robotics research, education, and product development.  More information on OSRF is available at www.osrfoundation.org or by following the company on Twitter @OSRFoundation

Media Contacts:

Tim Smith
Element Public Relations
tsmith@elementpr.com
415-350-3019

Qualcomm and Snapdragon are trademarks of Qualcomm Incorporated, registered in the United States and other countries.  All Qualcomm Incorporated trademarks are used with permission.

ROS Kong 2014 Announced

by

Cross posted from ROS Blog

We’re pleased to announce that we will be hosting ROS Kong 2014, an international ROS users group meeting, in Hong Kong on June 6th, immediately following ICRA. This one-day event will complement ROSCon 2014, which will happen later in the year (see below).

ROS Kong 2014 will feature invited speakers, lightning talks, and Birds-of-a-Feather sessions. There will be plenty of time to meet other ROS users both from Asia and around the world.

If you are interested in attending, please save the date: Friday June 6th, 2014. We will be setting up registration and distributing more information in the coming month. We have a large auditorium but registration will be limited.

If you have any questions or are interested in sponsoring the event please contact us at roskong-2014-oc@localhost.

In related news, we are tentatively planning to hold ROSCon 2014 in Chicago in September, in conjunction with IROS. Stay tuned for more on that event.

Project Tango Announced

by

Project Tango was just announced by Google’s ATAP group (http://www.google.com/atap/projecttango/). The project developed 3D localization and mapping capable of running in real-time on a phone. We expect the technology developed as part of Project Tango to be transformative for the robotics industry and are proud to have been a part of the process.


OSRF has been a partner with ATAP on the Tango project since May 2013. Our role was to bring our open source ROS (http://www.ros.org) software and expertise to bear on the problems that Tango is tackling. While Tango isn’t strictly a robotics project, there is a lot of similarity between their needs and what we have encountered over the years working with robots.

Among our contributions were developer tools for debugging, data logging, and data visualization. Project Tango used popular ROS tools, including rviz and rosbag, for development and debugging on a second screen, such as a desktop or laptop, both for live and recorded data.

Somewhat surprisingly, we also helped out with managing the complex code base that became Tango. With a large team of geographically distributed developers working at a furious pace, it’s not easy to keep track of the software in a project like this. Fortunately, we’re intimately familiar with this challenge from the past six years of ROS development. Project Tango was able to leverage the catkin build system developed for the ROS ecosystem to bring together the work from their many contributors.

In addition to integrating new code, catkin was used to integrate many existing libraries including familiar ROS dependencies such as OctoMap, OpenCV, and Eigen. To support both on-device and desktop debugging, catkin was used to enable compiling for Android devices as well as desktop targets from the same source tree.

Our work on Project Tango resulted in new features, bug fixes, and polish being added to many of our core tools, all of which have been made available to our community.