OSRF is pleased to welcome Stephen Brawner!
Currently a Computer Science PhD student at Brown University working with Chad Jenkins in the Brown Robotics Lab, Stephen is joining us as a software research intern for Fall 2012 / Winter 2013. He’ll be furthering his interest in researching hardware and software testing to improve robot system reliability and reduce the iteration time on development.
On Sept. 6th, OSRF officially received a contract from DARPA for the
simulation component of the Robotics Challenge, as reported here. The contract amounts to $6.44 million over the next 2.5 years, during which time we’ll take a major leap forward in simulation. We are also working with two research groups led by Dr. Karen Liu from Georgia Tech and Dr. Scott Delp from Stanford. Karen and Michael will conduct long-term research and development along the lines of deformable contact modeling, object manipulation, and constraint-based contact modeling.
Our efforts are now in full swing as we approach the DRC kickoff in late October of this year. Keep a look out for new tutorials, documentation, and features. This is also a great time to get involved by experimenting with
Gazebo and ROS, creating new and interesting applications, and getting your voice heard through our mailing list.
On the heels of the recent announcement that Rethink’s Baxter was built on ROS, we heard today from our friends at Toyota that their new robot is also running ROS!
Toyota’s Human Support Robot, or HSR, will provide assistance to older adults and people with disabilities. A one-armed mobile robot with a telescoping spine, the HSR is designed to operate in indoor environments around people. It can reach the floor, tabletops, and high counters, allowing it to do things like retrieve a dropped object or put something away in its rightful place. An exemplar of the next generation of robot manipulators, the arm is low-power and slow-moving, reducing the chance of accident or injury as it interacts with people.
And it runs ROS. Dr. Yasuhiro Ota, Manager of the Toyota Partner Robot Program, tells us that the HSR runs ROS Fuerte and uses a number of ROS packages, including:
roscpp,
rospy,
rviz,
tf,
std_msgs,
pcl,
opencv.
As for why they chose to use ROS, Dr. Ota says, “ROS provides an excellent software developmental environment for robot system integration, and it is also comprised of a number of useful ready-to-use functions.”
We’re pleased to announce a collaboration between OSRF and Yujin Robot. Our friends at Yujin have been long-time supporters of and contributors to ROS. In particular, they’ve been at the forefront of efforts to use ROS on Windows and in multi-robot environments. Daniel Stonier from Yujin presented on the state of ROS on Windows (slides) this year at ROSCon.
In the new Robotics in Concert project, funded by the Korean Ministry of Knowledge Economy, Sam Park and his team at Yujin are leading an international team to develop tools to enable authoring, deployment, and management of multi-robot systems in production environments. OSRF’s role in the project is to enhance and improve the ROS/Android toolchain to make it easy to build reliable “robot apps” that provide phone/tablet-based human interfaces. We’re looking forward to collaborating on this project with Yujin and other robotics groups in Korea, and are expecting some great open source software to result.
And we’re looking forward to playing with the sleek new KobukiBots:
There’s exciting news out of Boston today with the launch of Rethink Robotics’s new robot. Rethink Robotics is developing a family of low cost and highly intelligent robots that can perform simple tasks in a manufacturing environment, increasing the productivity of the people around them. Rethink Robotics was founded by Rodney Brooks, former Director of the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and co-Founder of iRobot Corporation.
Rethink’s robots can be taken out of the box, taught a task by anyone, and start work in a few hours, eliminating the need for systems integration. They are safe to interact with people at close range and are easy to train and retrain on the fly. They are nothing like any existing industrial robots.
While all of this is very exciting for the robotics industry, and certainly for our friends at Rethink, what we personally find most exciting is the role played by ROS in today’s news. Rethink’s new Baxter robot is, in the words of CEO Scott Eckert, “built upon ROS.” We had some hint from Rethink’s (then Heartland’s) support of ROSCon 2012 that they were doing something with ROS, but we were very pleasantly surprised today to hear that ROS is such a central part of Baxter.
As ROS edges closer to its five-year anniversary, this is a great milestone for the ROS community. Rethink is actively hiring for a Senior Developer Relations Engineer with expertise in ROS, and expects that individual to play an important role as part of the ROS community.
Congratulations to everyone at Rethink Robotics, and we are looking forward to their contribution to the ROS community.
We’re happy to announce that Nate Koenig successfully defended his PhD dissertation yesterday. You might not have known that, in addition to his work on Gazebo, Nate has been pursuing his Computer Science PhD in the USC Interaction Lab with his advisor Maja J Mataric’.
In his dissertation, titled “Robot Life-Long Task Learning from Human Demonstrations: A Bayesian Approach,” Nate enabled robots to learn goal oriented long-term decision processes from human demonstrations. The approach facilitated knowledge transfer between tasks, and online task modification. We’re honored to have another doctor on the staff at OSRF. Welcome back, Dr. Koenig!
OSRF is pleased to welcome Morgan Quigley! Morgan recently defended his PhD thesis, “Hardware and Software Systems for Personal Robots,” in the Stanford Computer Science Department. At OSRF, his work will span software, firmware, and embedded design, by creating infrastructure to allow seamless communication and coordination between ROS and embedded systems.
As the “godfather of ROS,” Morgan gave the opening keynote at ROSCon2012. He’s had a hand in the design and development of many robots, including this one from Sandia.
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As ROS software has become more widely used around the world, there are more and more people looking for experts who can help with everything from introductory training to custom engineering. At the same time, there’s a growing group of companies and individuals who offer ROS-related consulting services. With the goal of helping those two groups to connect with each other, today we’re announcing the OSRF Consultants Network.
Whether you’re looking for someone to help familiarize your team with ROS or to build a custom automated system, the consultants listed in the network can help.
If you or your company offer open source robotics consulting services, please send us your listing!
Back in July, Wolfram, Brian, and Nate did the California Death Ride (aka the Tour of the California Alps). It was a long but rewarding day, as evidenced by the mood at the top of the last climb:
Not pictured are fellow robotic cyclists Dieter Fox and Sebastian Thrun, who also did the ride.
An unusual feature of our building is the three flagpoles out front. We’re starting to put them to use (more to come):
