ROSCon 2022 - ROS-Industrial Consortium Americas Look Back

Last week, my colleagues, Jerry Towler and Fernando Martinez, and I made the grueling 14-hour trans-Pacific flight and 3-hour train ride to attend ROSCon in Kyoto Japan. All told, we probably would have endured a lot worse for the opportunity to travel to Japan and talk about robots.

Visiting with the ROS-I Asia-Pacific Team

On the first day, we attended the ros2_control workshop. The focus of the workshop was a deep dive into the revised architecture of ros2_control followed by a tutorial for creating a custom hardware interface. The coding exercise helped solidify some of the new ros2_control interface concepts and provided the opportunity to see the components in action via simulation using Gazebo. The Construct also provided access to a robot in their lab in Spain for hardware interface testing. Unfortunately, we did not finish in time to use it, but the Construct showed a live* demo on the hardware using a ros2_control interface.

On to the ROSCon program! As always, the keynote presentations highlighted some interesting applications of ROS, specifically in augmented reality for assistance in surgical applications and in GPS-denied UAV autonomy. A majority of the other presentations focused on software interoperability (OpenRMF), RMW layer development and challenges, AMR/UAV autonomy, and, of course, porting from ROS1 to ROS2. The program this year was light on manipulator-specific content, touching primarily on application deployment using ROS2 and ros2_control. The presentations that stood out the most to us covered changes to the ROS2 navigation stack enabling improved motion planning and support for different types of mobility (e.g., Ackermann, legged, and non-circular diff-drive robots); an improved file format for ROS2 bag files (MCAP); an IDE with visualization for defining kinematic chains in URDF; and updates to the BehaviorTree framework. Our final key takeaway from the presentations: all robotics companies everywhere are hiring. The full ROSCon program is posted online; links to the video presentations and slides are expected to be published within the next few weeks.

ROS-Industrial exhibition booth with Easy manipulation demo

In addition to the presentation program, ROSCon also hosted an exhibit hall for robotics vendors displaying robots, sensor technology and software/simulation applications. The ROS-I AP consortium also staffed a booth with an impressive demo showcasing an application where two robots pick and place objects into a bin and jointly manipulate the bin based on 3D perception feedback.

Overall, the first in-person ROSCon since 2019 was a success with roughly 800 attendees from more than 30 countries. It was a great opportunity to engage with the open-source community and learn more about what other roboticists around the world are working on. Looking forward to another ROSCon next year in New Orleans!

*live on hardware in Spain, viewing concurrently and remotely in Kyoto…neat!