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.

Brian was recently interviewed by Bill Morris of I Heart Robotics about OSRF.

We especially want to thank Steve Cousins, CEO of Willow Garage, who has been instrumental in the creation of OSRF. We’re working closely with Willow on software projects, notably Gazebo and ROS, and we look forward to Willow’s continued support of OSRF’s mission.