As part of the run-up to the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals in June, check out this piece on the role of tools like Gazebo: “The Value of Open Source Simulation for Robotics Development and Testing.”
Stay tuned for previews of what we’ll be showing off at the DRC Finals Expo…
We reported last year that our friends at MathWorks had released ROS support for MATLAB. They presented that work in a talk at ROSCon 2014.
That ROS support has now been promoted into an official MATLAB toolbox, called the Robotics System Toolbox. You can work in MATLAB with any ROS-enabled robot, simulator, or log data. Check out their overview video!
Accepted students will participate in real-world software development,
contributing to robotics projects like Gazebo, ROS, and Ignition
Transport, and engaging with the global robotics community, all while
getting paid. As a bonus, this year we also offer ROS-Industrial
projects.
Check out our GSoC site and don’t forget to visit our ideas page, which lists projects that we’re interested in. Feel free to ask
questions and propose suggestions at gsoc@localhost. The
student application period starts March 16th. Get ready for a robotics
coding summer!
We’re pleased to announce that OSRF has joined the Dronecode Project, which promotes open source platforms for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). That mission, plus the burgeoning use of ROS and Gazebo in UAV development, make Dronecode and OSRF natural partners.
We’ll work with Dronecode to make our tools even more useful for UAV projects. We’ll also bring together the general robotics community and the aerial robotics community. Both groups have valuable tools and capabilities which can be shared, to everyone’s benefit.
We look forward to getting more involved with the UAV community and seeing some amazing open source flying robots.
At the end of January, Baxter left OSRF for a stint in Corvallis, Oregon where he will be used in a project that is investigating the use of teleoperated robots in the treatment of highly contagious diseases such as Ebola. He will be joining the Personal Robotics Group, part of Oregon State University’s growing Robotics Program, as part of their NSF-funded work to bring robots to the front lines of the current Ebola outbreak.
Health care workers are at the highest risk of exposure when working in close proximity to infected patients. Even the use of personal protective equipment still exposes workers to considerable risk of infection. These risks are due to both faulty practice and extreme conditions, especially in harsh locations such as West Africa where high temperatures and humidity present real operational challenges. The use of intuitive teleoperation interfaces will enable health care workers to remotely operate robots (such as Baxter) to perform significant portions of their jobs from a safe distance. Examples of potential tasks include patient monitoring, equipment moving, and contaminated material disposal. This will allow health care workers to provide needed care while maintaining the important patient-health care worker interaction, all while making their jobs safer and more tolerable.
Here is an example of a task that Baxter will help investigate, as performed by the PR2:
The Gazebo team has been hard at work setting up a simulation environment for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s Hand Proprioception and Touch Interfaces (HAPTIX) program. The goal of the HAPTIX program is to provide amputees with prosthetic limb systems that feel and function like natural limbs, and to develop next-generation sensorimotor interfaces to drive and receive rich sensory content from these limbs. Managed by Dr. Doug Weber, HAPTIX is being run out of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office (BTO).
As the organization maintaining Gazebo, OSRF has been tasked with extending Gazebo to simulate prosthetic hands and test environments, and develop both graphical and programming interfaces to the hands. OSRF is officially releasing a new version of Gazebo for use by HAPTIX participants. Highlights of the new release include support for OptiTrack motion capture system; the NVIDIA 3D vision system; numerous teleoperation options including the Razer Hydra, SpaceNavigator, mouse, mixer board and keyboard; a high-dexterity prosthetic arm; and programmatic control of the simulated arm using Linux, Windows and MATLAB. More information and tutorials are available at the Gazebo website. Here’s an overview video:
“Our track record of success in simulation as part of the DARPA Robotics Challenge makes OSRF a natural partner for the HAPTIX program,” according to John Hsu, Chief Scientist at Open Source Robotics Foundation. “Simulation of prosthetic hands and the accompanying GUI will significantly enhance the HAPTIX program’s ability to help restore more natural functionality to wounded service members.”
Gazebo is an open source simulator that makes it possible to rapidly test algorithms, design robots, and perform regression testing using realistic scenarios. Gazebo provides users with a robust physics engine, high-quality graphics, and convenient programmatic and graphical interfaces. Gazebo was the simulation environment for the VRC, the Virtual Robotics Challenge stage of the DARPA Robotics Challenge.
This project also marks the first time Windows and MATLAB users can interact with Gazebo, thanks to our new cross-platform transport library. The scope is limited to the HAPTIX project, however plans are in motion to bring the entire Gazebo package to Windows.
Teams participating on HAPTIX will have access to a customized version of Gazebo that the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory Modular Prosthetic Limb (MPL) developed under the DARPA Revolutionizing Prosthetics program, as well as representative physical therapy objects used in clinical research environments.
More details on HAPTIX can be found in the DARPA announcement.
OSRF is pleased to welcome Ying Lu! Ying is currently a Ph.D. student at the Robotics Lab of the Department of Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, under the direction of Prof. Jeff Trinkle. Before that, she received a BS degree from University of Science and Technology of China. Her research focuses on contact and constraint models and solvers in multibody dynamics, with an emphasis on a benchmarking framework for unified interfaces to use different models and solvers. She was a member of the RPI Rockie team at the 2014 Sample Return Challenge, helping with the vision system, using ROS and OpenCV. Ying attended the 2013 and 2014 Grace Hopper Conference, a celebration for women in computing, and she was a 2014 Grace Hopper Scholar.
Ying is enthusiastic and excited to see how robotics is going to change the world, just as the computer revolution does!
OSRF is pleased to welcome Louise Poubel! Louise grew up in Brazil and thought why not cross the world and go to college in Japan? As if two continents weren’t enough, later she decided to get a master’s in robotics in Europe, where she studied in Poland and France. There, she did research on making humanoid robots imitate human whole body movements in real time. At the end of 2013, Louise joined OSRF as an intern, and has since been collaborating with GUI tools for Gazebo. Now she’s coming to conquer one more continent while joining our team full-time.
She is excited about open source technology and user experience because she believes that machines are here to make life easier for everyone around the world, not the opposite! Along this line of thought, she hopes one day to make robotic Rubik’s cubes which solve themselves while humans just sit back and relax.
We are happy to introduce a prototype for ROS 2 in deeply-embedded systems, using the stm3240g-eval board, which contains an STM32F4 microcontroller, an Ethernet interface, and some extra SRAM. The prototype combines a real-time operating system (NuttX) with a pseudo-POSIX interface, a DDS implementation (Tinq), and an example that uses ROS message types to communicate with other ROS 2 machines.
Here’s Victor to tell you about it:
This prototype has several caveats, most importantly that system performance is limited to ~3 Hz at the moment due to the UDP implementation of the underlying RTOS, but we expect that to improve drastically over time. We are hoping that this work is a starting point for the next generation of ROS-compatible sensors and actuators: robot parts that, out of the box, plug into an Ethernet network and interoperate in the ROS environment as first class participants.
Toward the end of last year, we asked you for financial support. And you responded. We received donations ranging from $2 to $100, coming from individuals spanning 26 countries. It’s fantastic to see this breadth of support. Thank you to everybody who donated!
You can continue to donate to OSRF at any time, and of course we’re always interested to talk with new corporate or government sponsors.
Another way to support OSRF, if you’re an Amazon customer, is to login to Amazon Smile and select us (Open Source Robotics Foundation) as your charity (learn more).