Last week was an exciting one in the robotics community, as hundreds of people and dozens of robotics-related companies descended on RoboBusiness 2013 in Santa Clara, CA; just down the road from OSRF headquarters.

In all the enthusiasm and bot-gawking, we wanted to point out some exciting ROS-related news that might be have been overlooked. Rethink Robotics, the company behind Baxter, enhanced the open source capabilities of their research robot.

The Baxter Research Robot now:

• supports MoveIt!, allowing researchers to plan and test trajectory algorithms in a virtual environment before the moves are executed on the robot; and
• offers integrated support for Gazebo, the widely used physics-based robotics simulator.

Those of you who have followed OSRF’s contributions to the DARPA Robotics Challenge, in particular the Virtual Robotics Challenge are already familiar with the capabilities of Gazebo and MoveIt!, but it’s great to see another top-notch robotics company embrace and extend ROS.

We had the opportunity to host Dave Coleman this past summer and witness the rise of Baxter in both reality and simulation. Dave worked closely with Gazebo, ROS, and Rethink to simulate Baxter and develop its controllers. His hard work helped the Rethink team deliver Baxter SDK version 2.0, and added another simulated robot for the robotics community.

Last Friday, UC Berkeley hosted the first ever Stanford-Berkeley Robotics Symposium (SBRS ’13). A number of OSRF employees were in attendance, and Steven Peters presented on one of our latest projects combining the use of iPython Notebook with gzweb, a Gazebo WebGL client. His presentation included an inspiring video of a stack of simulated dumpsters falling on a Stonehenge-like arrangement of many giant dual-link robot arms, in front of a typical neighborhood gas station. You had to be there.

Steven was one of approximately 36 presenters, each of whom were allotted 10 minutes to speak. Talks ranged from academic to industry-focused, and covered a broad spectrum of robotics topics from mass-producing robots and robotics consulting, to computer vision and modeling human decision making. Following is just a small sampling of the many great talks from SBRS 2013.

Mark Palatucci of Anki spoke about Anki Drive (available soon in Apple retail locations), and the company’s goal of “combining the emotion of physical products with the magic of video games.” The Anki Drive project tackles a variety of issues including multi-robot coordination, user interface design, wireless communication, and mass production of robots.

Steve Cousins of Savioke discussed his new company’s goal to make robots that help people in human environments. Savioke aims to continue work in the spirit of the Robots for Humanity project begun at Willow Garage. Steve also touched on the power of open source software as a “lubricant” that moves the robotics field forward.

Allison Okamura of Stanford’s CHARM Lab presented on her work with patients with cerebellar trauma. Using an exoskeleton robot that tracks movement, Allison and her team are looking at ways to alter limb inertia and correct dysmetria in these patients. The ultimate goal of this and related research is to improve health and quality of life.

Thanks to Oussama Khatib, Pieter Abbeel, Sachin Patil and the other volunteers for putting on such a great event. We look forward to SBRS 2014!

Yesterday we hosted a hackathon at the OSRF office with the team from Unbounded Robotics. That makes us some of the first people to get a look at their new (ROS-based) robot!

We’re thrilled to support the Unbounded team as they get ready for their big debut, and as they continue to advance the field of personal robotics. From playing with image recognition and object retrieval, to teleoperation with the Oculus Rift 3D virtual reality headset to a 3D robot simulator, our team was excited to get a sneak peak of what will soon be released to the rest of the world. To stay up to date on the latest from Unbounded Robotics, follow them @unboundedrobotx.

Morgan Quigley took the stage on Wednesday in recognition of the TR35 Award bestowed on him by MIT Technology Review Magazine. The venue was emTech 2013 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While Morgan admitted afterwards to a dose of nerves, you’d never know it based on the reaction from the audience.

Following fellow TR35 recipients with expertise in Big Data, a biophysisict working in wind power, and a nuclear scientist, Morgan regaled the crowd with the past, present and future of open source robotics.

The full presentation will be online soon courtesy of Technology Review and we’ll update this page as soon as we get our hands on it.

Paul Hvass from the ROS Industrial Consortium has the following reminder:

You will find a number of ROS and ROS-Industrial related events at RoboBusiness:

• ROS-Industrial Consortium members’ meeting: 9:00 a.m. to Noon on October 23 (details below)
• ROS-I Consortium Panel Discussion: ROS-Industrial will be the topic of a panel discussion during the Agile Manufacturing Workshop. The panel will consist of automation experts from Boeing, Yaskawa, and Southwest Research Institute who will discuss current industry trends and opportunities and how ROS-I can accelerate implementation of next generation industrial solutions — 2 p.m. on October 23.
• ROS Matures and Looks Ahead: A presentation by Ryan Gariepy, CTO and Co-Founder of Clearpath Robotics — 2:45 p.m. on October 24
• Building Industrial Robots for Dynamic Response: A presentation by Clay Flannigan, Manager of Robotics and Automation Engineering, Southwest Research Institute — 1:30 p.m. on October 25
• Marrying ROS to External Software: A presentation by Tully Foote, ROS Platform Manager, Open Source Robotics Foundation — 2:15 p.m. on October 25
• SwRI/ROS-Industrial Exhibitor Booth #328: meet in person with SwRI ROS-I experts

ROS-Industrial Consortium

ROS-Industrial is an open-source software framework for next-generation manufacturing automation. Be part of the community: Leverage advanced capabilities from the Robot Operating System (ROS) like mobile manipulation, on-the-fly path planning, collision avoidance, grasp planning, and 3D perception for your industrial robots and peripherals.

The ROS-Industrial Consortium members’ meeting will precede RoboBusiness. The Consortium is a membership organization providing cost-shared applied R&D for advanced factory automation. Consortium members drive new capabilities in ROS-I by championing Focused Technical Projects (FTPs) based on their near-term automation requirements. The ROS-Industrial Consortium Americas invites you to become a member and participate from 9 a.m. to noon on Wednesday, October 23, 2013, at RoboBusiness in Santa Clara, CA. Attendees will get the inside scoop on:

• The progress of ROS-Industrial: MTConnect Bridge, support for new robots, and integration with MoveIt!
• Consortium activities, financials, membership, and the progress of RIC Europe
• Consortium roadmap presentation and voting
• Available FTPs

Registration

Registration is required. Please contact Paul Hvass (paul.hvass@swri.org) for a registration promotional code for early bird pricing of $895 (regardless of registration date) that will alert the event organizers that you plan to attend the Consortium meeting. If you are not currently a Consortium member but are considering membership, please contact us.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Last week, Hugo, Ian, Tully, and Brian were in Washington, DC for the first National Robotics Initiative meeting. In addition to presenting a poster, we taught a 2-hour tutorial using our latest web-based tools for managing and interacting with cloud-hosted simulations.

A couple of tutorial participants were even using Gazebo from their mobile devices:

It was great to see so many people from the US robotics community together in one place. One odd thing about the meeting was that, as it was held on the first two days of the new fiscal year, the federal government shutdown prevented any of the government folks from attending. It must be frustrating to organize such an event and then be told that you can’t go.

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.