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 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.

Having recovered from our exhilirating (and exhausting) trip to the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Trials in Florida, we’ve been mulling over the results of the Trials and looking back on the simulation-based Virtual Robotics Challenge (VRC) that we held in the summer.

As you’ll recall, the goals of the VRC were two-fold. First, we wanted to identify the teams from around the world who are the best at writing software for remote supervisory control of a humanoid robot in disaster response situations. After the VRC, the top seven teams were given access to an Atlas robot from Boston Dynamics, with which they then competed in the Trials. And because they only had a few months between receiving their robot
and heading to the Trials, the second goal of the VRC was to force teams to build and test their software in simulation so that they could be up and running with a working system as soon as they took delivery of the Atlas hardware.

Looking at the results, we’re feeling pretty good about the VRC. At the Trials, which saw sixteen teams compete, five of the top eight teams were previously top finishers in the VRC (the top eight from the Trials qualified for continued DARPA funding). And their relative performance at the Trials almost matched their relative performance in the VRC:

So a majority of the top teams at the Trials had first competed and won in simulation, and they were then able to transition their software from simulation to hardware in a very short period of time (they had also received a very capable Atlas robot, which surely contributed to their successes).

We’re proud of these results and we feel that they bode well for the use of simulation in future robotics projects, in competitions, and in education.

It’s also worth noting that team WRECS started out as an unfunded “Track C” team, yet placed 2nd in the VRC and 6th in the Trials, outperforming most of the fully funded teams along the way. Perhaps we’ll see more of this kind of non-traditional source selection in future programs.