Last week, OSRF went to CloudBeat. Hugo was in a panel discussion about the selection of Cloud provider infrastructure. Inspired by the success of the Virtual Robotics Challenge (VRC), OSRF is continuing the development of CloudSim, which allows us to run Gazebo simulations, both on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) virtual cloud and the SoftLayer bare-metal cloud. In parallel, we’re also exploring OpenStack private cloud support, and are looking forward to the advent of GPU virtualization technology and the upcoming cloud gaming industry.

Hugo got a chance to meet with Duke Scarda, CTO of Softlayer, our cloud partner for the VRC, and Mike Miller of Cloudant. Mike was insightful in comparing AWS to the iPhone and OpenStack to Android of a few years ago: the iPhone was certainly the visionary leader and first to market. We should see interesting developments in the coming months as the industry seems to be rallying around OpenStack and SDN (Software Defined Networking)… prompting Amazon and VMWare to reinvent themselves.

Let us know what you’d like the ROS cloud to be like.

The Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) has a clear mission: “To support the development, distribution, and adoption of open source software for use in robotics research, education, and product development.” We have three exciting Google Summer of Code projects contributing to CloudSim, Gazebo, and ROS, which currently represent three of our biggest open source efforts.

Esteve Fernandez has been adding support for OpenStack to CloudSim, a project developed by OSRF to run robotics simulations in the cloud. CloudSim was used to support the DARPA Virtual Robotics Challenge and currently supports the Amazon and SoftLayer clouds. Esteve added support for private clouds to CloudSim, enabling organizations to run simulations on their own networks. Furthermore, Esteve is contributing to CloudSim by fixing bugs, improving the code base and helping with any task that comes up. In the following weeks, he will be making CloudSim constellations accessible to users in an OpenStack cloud provided by OSRF as a public service.

Andrei Haidu is developing a fluid dynamics physics engine for the Gazebo robot simulator that will enable the use of aerial and underwater vehicles in simulation.

Gonzalo Abella is developing a new parameter server prototype for ROS. He is exploring making all parameters dynamic, and integrating the capabilities of the dynamic_reconfigure package into the core API.

Congratulations are in order. OSRF’s own Morgan Quigley was announced today as a recipient of MIT Technology Review’s annual list of 35 top young innovators. For his work in robotics software and electronics, Morgan has been honored as an outstanding inventor on the list.

There are very few individuals in the technology industry with the moniker of ‘The Godfather,’ but Morgan is one of the few. If you search for ‘Godfather of ROS’ you will find links to Morgan’s work, including the opening keynote of the inaugural ROSCon 2012 conference.

“This is a wonderful recognition of Morgan’s contributions to the world of robotics,” said Brian Gerkey, CEO of OSRF. “I’ve said this many times: if you’ve done anything with ROS, you’ve used Morgan’s code.”

Morgan joined OSRF in August 2012 after completing his dissertation defense in the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. While at Stanford, Morgan developed hardware and software systems for personal robots, including the design and initial implementation of ROS in close collaboration with colleagues, including two of whom (Brian Gerkey and Tully Foote) are now at OSRF. On the hardware side, Morgan was the electrical and software designer for the low-cost, highly dexterous hand produced for the 2010-2012 DARPA ARM-H program on a team led by Curt Salisbury of Sandia National Laboratories.

“Over the years, we’ve had success in choosing women and men whose innovations and companies have been profoundly influential on the direction of human affairs,” said editor in chief and publisher Jason Pontin. “Previous winners include Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the cofounders of Google; Mark Zuckerberg, the cofounder of Facebook; Jonathan Ive, the chief designer of Apple; and David Karp, the creator of Tumblr. We’re proud of our selections and the variety of achievements they celebrate, and we’re proud to add Morgan to this prestigious list.”

Morgan and the rest of this year’s honorees are currently featured at technologyreview.com, and in the September/October print magazine, which hits newsstands on September 3. Morgan will also appear in person at the upcoming EmTech MIT conference from October 9-11 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

OSRF is pleased to welcome Heather Boortz as a summer intern! Heather is currently at Olin College, a small engineering school just outside of Boston, working on her BS in Engineering, focusing on computer engineering and robotics. She is excited to be out here working on the CloudSim team.

After much anticipation, the winners of the DARPA Virtual Robotics Challenge (VRC) have been announced! Twenty-six teams from around the world qualified to compete in the VRC. Teams were judged on a number of factors, including the number of points earned in each task, the amount of bandwidth used when communicating with the robot, and the speed at which each task was completed. The results are posted in this DARPA news release . Congratulations to all of the teams that participated for their superb work during this competition!

The VRC was the first of three competitions that make up the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC). Teams were given three main tasks to complete, and had five opportunities to complete each of the three tasks, with slight variations present in each attempt. The three main tasks were as follows: 1) Walk to a utility vehicle, get into the vehicle, drive it along the road and around obstacles, get out of the vehicle, and walk through the final gate. 2) Walk across varying terrain, including mud, over uneven terrain, and through a rubble-strewn field. 3) Walk to a fire hose, pick it up, screw the hose into a pipe, and turn a valve. These sample tasks reflect some of the actions required of rescue workers in disaster response scenarios. DARPA began with this virtual competition because the software to control advanced robots for disaster response is a critical prerequisite to making such robots work in the real world.

At OSRF, we’ve spent the last year building on top of Gazebo to create the DRC Simulator, which was used in the VRC. We have improved many aspects of Gazebo, including the physics models, sensor capabilities, real-time factor, and model accuracy and capabilities. In addition, we made it possible to run simulations in the cloud, making simulation-based work more accessible to folks interested in robotics. We’d like to thank all of the teams for their feedback, contributions, and support during the development phase of the VRC. The work we’ve done on the Simulator is, of course, all open source and available to anyone interested. Over the next few years, we will continue to improve Gazebo and aim to support and facilitate future robotics R&D.

We are not only honored to have been selected by DARPA to work with them on this stage of the DRC, but also proud of the fact that the Simulator will continue to be a resource for robot research and development in the future.

Again, congratulations to the winning teams for their truly impressive efforts and creativity in solving the VRC’s difficult tasks. We’re very excited to see what happens in the next round of the DRC.

For more information, see the DARPA VRC Winners Announcement.

You can see DARPA’s VRC overview video here .

You can also have a look at the VRC driving task, walking task, and firehose manipulation task.

It has been a long and exciting process, and the winners of the Virtual Robotics Challenge are set to be announced tomorrow.

Shortly after the announcement, Gill Pratt from DARPA and Nate Koenig from OSRF will host a Reddit chat where you have the opportunity to pose your own questions about the VRC, the current state of robotics, the ongoing role of the Simulator, and (almost) anything else.

We will start taking questions for the Reddit chat at 12:30 p.m. EST tomorrow, June 27, and answer questions from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. EST.

More details on how to access the Reddit chat will be published on our blog tomorrow, and also via @OSRFoundation and @DARPA

UPDATE: Check out the AMA here.