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.

After 74 exciting and grueling hours of staffing the OSRF office around the clock, the Virtual Robotics Challenge (VRC) is finished! The first teams began competing in Japan last Monday afternoon PDT, and the final competition task was completed shortly after 6 pm last Thursday PDT. Over the course of those three days, we saw many creative and impressive solutions to the difficult VRC tasks.

We’re excited to see the final results this coming Thursday, June 27. Stay tuned to find out which teams won an ATLAS robot!

For more information, visit http://theroboticschallenge.org .

OSRF is pleased to welcome Dave Coleman as a summer intern! Dave is a PhD student at the University of Colorado Boulder under Prof. Nikolaus Correll. His research interests include motion planning, grasping and perception. Dave is a strong believer in the community-driven open source ROS project and is happy to be returning to OSRF after his last summer’s internship at Willow Garage.

As of Monday at 4 pm local time, the Virtual Robotics Challenge (VRC) is underway! The VRC is the first of three competitions that make up the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC), and up to six winning teams will be awarded an ATLAS robot, along with additional funding. We’ve been working hard in the months leading up to the VRC, and are excited as teams begin competing across the world. Stay tuned because the VRC winners will be announced on June 27!

For more information, visit http://theroboticschallenge.org .