From ros-users@:

The Robonaut team has launched a TopCoder challenge to create a controller for our ISS taskboard simulation that improves the behavior of the switches, etc. and publishes the states to rostopics. If you’d like to help out (and potentially make up to $1500), check out the challenge here.

From the challenge description:

Robonaut 2 is the first humanoid robot in space and was sent to the space station with the intention of taking over tasks too dangerous or too mundane for astronauts.
But Robonaut 2 needs to learn how to interact with the types of input devices the astronauts use on the space station. To do that, we have built several Taskboards for Robonaut to play with.
In future challenges, you will control Robonaut and teach him how to interact with the Taskboard. But first, the simulation for the ISS Taskboard needs to be fixed.

For full requirements, please check here.

Recently Willow Garage, maker of the PR2 service robot and developer/custodian of the ROS core, announced that their funding model was about to change. This has precipitated speculation about the future of ROS and, by extension, ROS-Industrial. What has not been widely communicated is that the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF), an independent nonprofit company founded last summer with support from Willow Garage, was chartered in-part to become the long-term home for ROS core development, ROS wiki hosting, and ROS answers support. OSRF recently announced that key ROS developers from Willow Garage soon will move to OSRF. We have been in communication with both Willow Garage and OSRF and know that the ROS core is in the capable hands of the same developers who are credited with its widespread adoption over the past five years. Furthermore, we note that OSRF is participating in the ROS-Industrial Consortium kick off meeting March 6-7^th (agenda). We look forward to continuing collaboration with both Willow Garage and OSRF as open source robotics continues to accelerate the growth and capabilities of robotic systems.

A Press Release from Clearpath Robotics

Kitchener, ON, Canada – February, 2013

We have received many inquiries about the future of ROS since the announcement of a change in Willow Garage’s business plan. To our many valued clients, you may rest assured that we will continue to support and build upon ROS and open-source robotics software for our products.

We are proud to say that we were one of the first companies to support and use ROS, and we are humbled to see how much it has advanced the robotics industry. We believe that the strength of the global ROS community is at critical mass and we are confident it will continue to thrive and grow.

The transition of ROS stewardship from Willow Garage to the Open Source Robotics Foundation has been under way for many months and Clearpath will do everything in it’s power to assist with this transition. Our position as a partner to both academic and industrial research has given us a unique perspective on commercializing robotics from the lab to the real world, and the ROS ecosystem is making this happen faster than we had ever hoped.

The first 5 years of ROS has changed our industry forever. We can’t wait to see what the next 5 years of ROS will bring.

The ROS-Industrial team was at the Automate trade show a couple of weeks ago. Here’s a great video showing the ROS-Industrial capabilities that they demonstrated:

As we mentioned on Monday, here at OSRF we’re starting to play a more prominent role in the ROS community. As a major step in that direction, we’re pleased to announce that, in the next few weeks, Tully Foote, Dirk Thomas, and William Woodall will be joining OSRF!

You probably already know each of them from ros-users@ and ROS Answers, not to mention GitHub. And if you’ve used ROS, you’ve used their code, as they work on many of the core ROS libraries and tools.

We’re excited to have Tully, Dirk and William on the team and are looking forward to being a part of their future contributions to ROS.

First of all, we’d like to extend a heartfelt thank you to Scott and Steve and the entire Willow Garage team who have, over the last five years, made an unprecedented contribution to the robotics community. Willow Garage set out to have impact, and there can be no doubt that ROS has had a worldwide impact, on a scale greater than we ever hoped. Thank you!

As you may have heard, there are some changes underway at Willow Garage.

Given the recent news, we’re working with our friends at Willow Garage to accelerate the transition of ROS stewardship to OSRF. One of the goals in establishing OSRF was to provide a long-term home for ROS, and that’s where we’re headed with this transition. Through generous support from the National Robotics Initiative, we’re assembling a team at OSRF to continue to guide the development of ROS. We don’t expect ROS development to slow down, nor do we expect any interruption to the online resources that we’ve all come to rely on (e.g., the ROS wiki and ROS answers).

At OSRF, we look forward to taking a more prominent role in the ROS ecosystem. We’ll be seeking increased community involvement in ROS development, decision-making, maintenance, and support. Open source software works best when everyone is invested and involved, and we will work closely with the ROS community, including product development groups, research teams, students at all levels, hobbyists, and interested groups everywhere.

Here’s to ROS’s next five years!

OSRF is pleased to welcome Kazuto Murase! Kazuto studies Mechano-Infomatics at the University of Tokyo in the JSK Lab. He has been developing a robot with arm and eye, integrating recognition and action to perform tasks.

At OSRF, he will apply his experience developing rosjava/Android applications to improve the suite of apps available for use with robots, including new tools for managing deployment and launching of apps. He is excited to learn about America and have a true California experience during his time at OSRF.

OSRF is pleased to welcome Carlos Agüero! Carlos received his Ph.D. and M.S. from Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Computer Science, under the supervision of Dr. José M. Cañas and Dr. Vicente Matellán. Carlos is a Robotics enthusiast, and the multidisciplinary aspects of robotics and the challenges faced by real robotics projects have sculpted his formation and career. Ad hoc networks for mobile robots were the target of his early days of research. He designed and developed an autonomous system for detecting overtaking maneuvers applied to trucks. Carlos’s research has been focused on multi-robot object localization, task allocation and multi-target object localization. He has been a proud RoboCuper since 2005 and is a co-founder of Spiteam, the RoboCup Standard Platform League team. He co-developed a complete robot architecture (Behaviour-based Iterative Control Architecture, BICA) from scratch for the Nao robot applied to robot soccer and Alzheimer therapy.

Before joining OSRF, Carlos held a faculty position in the GSyC department at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos and was Director of the Telematics and Computer Systems Master program. In 2010 and 2011, he visited the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, and CORAL Research group at Carnegie Mellon University.

OSRF is pleased to welcome Jose Luis Rivero! Jose Luis is a Computer Engineer from the Carlos III University of Madrid. During his university times he was tempted by compilers and customized binaries and joined the Gentoo Linux project as developer for 6 years. Jose Luis moved from Madrid to Barcelona to finish his studies at UPC University. There he started work in the Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial (IRI). Being an open source enthusiast, and together with his colleagues Guillem Alenyà and Sergi Hernandez, Jose Luis began The Humanoid Lab initiative, which brings robotics and open source projects to university students. In his last two years at IRI, Jose Luis worked with PhD students to improve software practices and encourage development of open source ROS code for mobile robotics and perception and manipulation. For Jose Luis, working at OSRF, producing robotics software following an open source philosophy, is a dream come true.