First Impressions Using Tesseract Ignition

I have a robotics application where I am using an ABB robot with a fairly simple environment and no complex motions expected. I decided this would be a good candidate for testing the new Tesseract Ignition tools and the new Tesseract command language feature that is currently in development on GitHub alongside the main master branch of Tesseract (also TrajOpt and Descartes are being updated to work with these new changes). After installing the Tesseract Ignition tools, I was able to put in our URDF which has a simple end effector on a standard ABB IRB 2400 URDF. The Tesseract Setup Wizard allowed me to easily generate an allowed collision matrix with a single click after loading in my URDF, and then the kinematic groups tool was also very easy to use to add my desired kinematic chain for the motion planner. From here I was able to have an srdf configuration file that would be usable in the Tesseract motion planning environment.

In software, I was then able to extend the new Tesseract Command Language planning server class and add my own planning profiles for freespace, transition, and raster motions that allow for parallel processing of motion plans in a variety of pre-made taskflow structures. Once finished I could easily load in a toolpath and quickly generate paths using the new planning server. The new Tesseract Ignition Visualization tool allowed me to visualize all the target waypoints and the robot motion. (Note I had to build Tesseract Ignition from source to get the visualization to work for now)

Overall this integration process has been user friendly and allows me to spend less time having to worry about the details of the motion planning process.

Editor's Note: Tyler Marr is a Research Engineer at Southwest Research Institute and has been developing and deploying ROS-based systems involving autonomous motion planning during his time at SwRI.

A brief report from the ROS-Industrial EU Spring workshop

Thanks to the participation of several members of the ROS-Industrial community in Europe and of new participants interested in knowing more on the topic, we are happy to report on a successful ROS-Industrial EU Spring’18 Workshop at Fraunhofer IPA.

During the two days of May 28-29, organizations within the ROS-Industrial consortium had the opportunity to present their current development projects to an audience of technical experts.

Erle Robotics, represented by Irati Zamalloa, presented the concept of a common interface for the description of robot modules and hardware sub-components allowing their reusability, composability and interoperability. The project is already publicly available as a ROS2.0 implementation. During the ensuing Q&A, feedback from participants pointed to the possibility of integrating such effort with a MDE approach, where the information could be semantically annotated and verified. Further feedback is welcome, with a github repository setup for the purpose.

The second workshop session focused on ways to make ROS-based systems and PLCs interoperable. Sebastian Friedl from the University of Stuttgart gave an introduction to the OPC-UA architecture and the improvements that his institution is making on this open source implementation of the protocol. He also presented the ROS <-> OPC-UA gateway that is under development within the SeRoNet project.

On a similar topic, Tiago Pinto from INESC TEC continued the session showing how his team approaches communication between CODESYS and ROS systems. The implemented wrapper is already being used for practical application within the project ScalABLE 4.0, with source code scheduled for public release in August.

Wrapping up the topic, Ludovic Delval from Faunhofer IPA presented a survey of the existing ROS drivers implementations supporting different fieldbus protocols. The detailed overview was appreciated by the participants and is available as reference here.

As part of the efforts of the ROSIN project to make ROS-Industrial better and business-friendlier, partners of the consortia joined for the second day of the workshop to show the tools developed for the quality assurance on the ROS software development. Jonathan Hechtbauer from Fraunhofer IPA and Anthony Remazeilles from Tecnalia gave an update of the software efforts like the improvements on the quality badge, the rosinstall time machine tool, and a generator for ROS packages. Preliminary code is available at the github organization of the project.

Concluding the event, the ROSIN coordinator Carlos Hernández Corbato informed the audience about the opportunities for ROSIN Focused Technical Projects. A grant up to 100K to fund your software development is available to institutions with a legal seat in the EU and associated countries. The application process is explained in detail at the project page.

Given the request from interested parties who could not join us in Stuttgart, we made the content and slides of this workshop publicly available under the following link.

We look forward to a second edition of the workshop in the fall!

Announcing ROS#

This is a guest blog post by Martin Bischoff on behalf of his employer Siemens AG. Thanks to Martin for the update, and to Siemens for its generous support to the ROS-Industrial Consortium!

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We are happy to announce that we published ROS# on github.com/siemens/ros-sharp!

...is a set of software libraries and tools in C# for communicating with ROS from .NET applications, in particular Unity.

ROS# consists of:

• RosBridgeClient, a .NET API to ROS using rosbridge_suite on the ROS side.
• UrdfImporter, a URDF file parser for .NET applications.
• RosSharp.unitypackage, a Unity Asset package providing Unity-specific extensions to RosBridgeClient and UrdfImporter.

ROS# helps you to:

• Communicate with ROS from within your Windows app: subscribe and publish topics, call and advertize services, set and get parameters and use all features provided by rosbridge_suite.

• Import your robot's URDF model as a Gameobject in Unity3D. Import the data either directly from the ROS system using the robot_description service or via a URDF file that you copied into your Unity Asset folder.

(click on the images for videos)

• Control your real Robot via Unity3D.

• Visualize your Robot's actual state and sensor Data in Unity3D.

• Simulate your robot in Unity3D with the data provided by the URDF and without using a connection to ROS. Beside visual components as meshes and textures, also Joint parameters and masses, CoMs, Inertia and Collider specifications of Rigidbodies are imported.

• And much more! ROS# is useful for a wide variety of applications. Think about Machine Learning, Human-Machine Interaction, Tele-Engineering, Virtual Prototyping, Robot Fleet Operation, Gaming and Entertainment!

Got Interested?

Please do not hesitate to try it out yourself and to get in touch with us! We are very interested in your feedback, applications, improvement suggestions, and contributions!

ROS# Development Team (ros-sharp.ct@siemens.com), Siemens AG, Corporate Technology, 2017

A brief report from the ROS-Industrial Conference 2017

The ROS-Industrial Conference 2017 was held last week, and once again it grew bigger compared to the previous year’s edition. It expanded to a three-days event, with 28 talks attended by more than 110 participants from both industry and applied research organizations. The talks covered a wide range of topics including technical aspects of open-source robotics, as well as non-technical ones like community dynamics and business viability, application-oriented aspects and future challenges for open-source robotics, like safety and security. Here follows a selection from some of the topics and the side events covered during the conference.

Matt Robinson, Program Manager for the ROS-Industrial Consortium Americas, described how ROS-Industrial has provided large players in manufacturing, who have struggled introducing automation, with an opportunity to introduce agility to manufacturing operations, hence improving utilization of resources and a broader impact on the overall value stream. Martin Hägele, head of department robot and assistive systems at Fraunhofer IPA, gave an overview about ongoing developments in the global robotics market. He addressed both industrial and service robots and presented data which the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) collects and publishes annually in the “World Robotics Report.” Jaime Martin Losa, CEO of eProsima, showed how Micro-ROS bridges the technological gap between the established robotic software platforms on high-performance computational devices and low-level libraries for microcontrollers. The first day ended with guided tours the Robotics Lab, the Application Center Industry 4.0 and the “Milestones of Robotics” exhibition at Fraunhofer IPA.

Min Ling Chan reported on how the ROS-Industrial Consortium in Asia Pacific is setting its objective and strategy towards understanding the industry needs in this region. Dirk Thomas from the Open Source Robotics Foundation introduced the forthcoming ROS2 which will provide notable advantages over ROS1, such as support for multiple operating systems and for DDS rather than a custom built middleware. Torsten Kröger, former Head of the Robotics Software Division at Google and now professor at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), showed examples and use-cases of manipulation and human-robot interaction tasks in order to provide a comprehensible insight into deterministic robot motion planning for safety-critical robot applications. As part of the ROSIN project Yvonne Dittrich, professor at University of Copenhagen, investigates how the ROS community takes care of quality and presented her preliminary findings. After some demonstrations of ROS-native hardware and installations the second conference day closed with a stroll through the Stuttgart Christmas market and the social dinner.

Felipe Garcia Lopez, researcher at Fraunhofer IPA, gave insights into the Cloud Navigation he developed for mobile robots in intralogistics applications. Communication via cloud between mobile systems operating in the same traffic area enables efficient interaction without idle times even with dynamic obstacles present. Finally, Kimberly Hambuchen, Principal Technologist for Robotics in NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD), and Martin Azkarate from the European Space Agency (ESA) showed which requirements on software frameworks for space robotics currently exist and presented information on how NASA is using ROS for robotic prototypes for future space exploration missions.

As the event was sold out a week before the event started, we plan on hosting it on a bigger scale next year, while still targeting an early December timeframe. For your reference, the detailed agenda of the whole event as well as all slides from the speakers can be found here.

Call for participation: ROS-Industrial Conference 2017 (Dec 12-14, Stuttgart - Germany)

Five years after the very first public event entirely devoted to discussing the potential benefits of a shared, open-source framework for industrial robotics and automation, Fraunhofer IPA will host the 2017 edition of the ROS-Industrial Conference in Stuttgart, Germany, on December 12 to 14. From its inception five years ago, the initiative went from proof of concepts developed by a few organizations envisioning to advance manufacturing through open source, to:

• a worldwide initiative, with three regional consortia financially backed by more than 50 organizations
• a growing collection of software packages, expanding the capabilities and the platform support of ROS
• a number of installations of ROS-powered equipment working in production within industrial environments

We are pleased to invite you to join us in Stuttgart to reflect on those past 5 years, gauge the current status of the initiative through tech talks and application examples, and hear from the experts about the next obstacles to overcome for open-source robotics. You are welcome to browse the updated schedule of the event, as well as to preregister (the event is sold out and the waiting list is full!)

From left to right, a selection of the demos, talks and tours offered to the attendees of the event: Drag&bot; Cloud navigation; Robot lab (ground floor) and "Milestones of Robotics" museum (mezzanine) - images copyright Fraunhofer IPA

Cross-Post: The ROSIN Project Press Release→

Click the image to view the full post on the Fraunhofer IPA website.

FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik and ROS-Industrial

Submitted by: Arne Rönnau, FZI

the ros-i powered fanuc m710 on display at Automatica 2016

The FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik (FZI Research Center for Information Technology), an independent research institute associated with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany, has a long standing history of working with various robotic frameworks for a number of robot platforms. From special kinematics, like a six-legged walking robot or two-armed service robot with body joints on a mobile platform, to service and industrial robots like the UR 10 and the Fanuc M710. Since 2000, FZI has developed its own robotic framework MCA (Modular Controller Architecture) which later became MCA2 and which is still used on many robot systems today also outside of FZI. With the increasing popularity and maturity of ROS, however, the focus has shifted towards using and expanding ROS rather than further improving the in-house framework (which is still used for many low-level tasks).

With the release of ROS Diamondback, FZI started to use ROS on the robotic Platforms KAIRO III, a snake-like inspection robot, and LAURON IV, a six legged walking robot in conjunction with MCA2. The FZI UAV fleet consisting of Parrot AR-Drones and the Asctec UAVs Pelican and Falcon 8 used ROS Fuerte as the main framework from the start. It was also commonly used to analyze data of the autonomous car CoCar, for which the available visualization tools proved to be very valuable.

The development efforts of ROS components by FZI also increased together with its extended usage. During the preparation of LAURON V for the first SpaceBot Cup by the German Aerospace Center DLR in 2013, initial fixes were provided for libraries such as the SMACH viewer and the robot_web_tools, as they were used extensively to enable autonomous exploration by the walking robot of a Mars-like environment. In October 2014 a larger contribution, the schunk_svh_driver package, was released on behalf of Schunk. It is providing hardware support for one of the most mechanically advanced robotic hands today. In 2016 a driver for the LWA4P with CanOpen support followed. Today the FZI also offers workshops teaching ROS to companies when developers need a concise introduction or just specific help with their projects.

ROS has also become a major research topic in public funded projects. The Human Brain Project (HBP), which FZI takes part in, relies heavily on gazebo as a simulation environment, for which tools like a blender-based intuitive robot designer are being developed. The project ReApp (Reusable robotic Applications for flexible robots), puts ROS-Industrial at its core, and is in fact a team effort with other ROS-focused institutions like Fraunhofer IPA. By adding semantically-enriched models to ROS packages, ReApp further enhances the already reuse-friendly structure of ROS by enabling easier search and automatic replacement of packages. During preparations for Automatica 2016, FZI used the ROS Industrial stack for a Fanuc M710 and implemented the ROS-Industrial-IO REP for Fanuc robots as first contribution to the ROS-Industrial community, which is currently being finalized.

Since August 2016 FZI is part of the ROS-Industrial Consortium Europe, through which it plans to further increase its activities around ROS and ROS-Industrial.

Better supporting the growing ROS-Industrial software platform

As ROS-Industrial approaches its fifth anniversary, we wanted to share some reflections on how the initiative is evolving and on some adjustments in policy to maintain it on a healthy, sustainable growth path.

The first demo showcasing the advantages of ROS on industrial hardware, a pick-and-place application performed on a Motoman SIA10D, was developed in the fall of 2011 by Shaun Edwards. From this early effort we have come a long way both in terms of Consortia and Community building and of further development of the software platform. With the recent addition of the Asia Pacific region we now have more than 40 organizations supporting the ROS-Industrial Consortia worldwide. On the software side, ROS-Industrial is growing in terms of more supported hardware and of more, and more advanced, capabilities that it offers to industrial users.

In parallel to the effort of expanding the Consortia and to keep the "voice of business" in the loop, the software development community is growing under the technical leadership of Shaun Edwards and Gijs van der Hoorn. We have been hosting online developer meetings since last fall: now held monthly, they provide a venue for contributors to become more involved with the rest of the community and eventually join it on a stable basis. In addition to growing the codebase, we are gradually enforcing best practices in the development process to ensure a better overall software quality. These include an improved review process for PRs; unit and system test coverage; continuous integration tests.

While the expansion of the development community brings on-board very welcome contributors, the commitment required to maintain and support a fast expanding software platform is calling for a more structured approach than we had so far. This in order for us to be able to more effectively and more fairly commit development resources, and for our users to get a better understanding of the support level that they can expect.

A more effective and fair allocation of resources means standing behind the code which supports the activities of Consortia members. These are the organizations making the initiative possible, as they provide financial support and public advocacy for the adoption of open-source software in industrial robotics. A better understanding of support level means helping our users to set their expectations to an appropriate level when evaluating the adoption of specific packages. For instance, a manufacturer actively supporting the driver for its equipment, directly or through its regional ROS-Industrial Consortium, makes for a much different situation than having to rely solely on community support.

As a first step towards this direction, we announce the following levels of support for packages in the ros-industrial github organization:

• consortium / vendor: for packages supporting the activities of a Consortium member, which ideally also contributes with in-house technical support (e.g., robot drivers); for core ROS-I packages developed and maintained by the technical leads;
• vendor: for packages directly supported by the vendor's technical staff;
• community: support is community-based, and as such it is best-effort and based upon the work of volunteers.

support badges for ROS-I packages

We are currently rolling out this scheme by gradually assigning "badges" corresponding to the appropriate support level to the various ROS-Industrial packages. We also want to provide soon users with means to "ping the OEM" behind a specific piece of hardware which is currently at community-level support, and we are currently looking for the most effective means to do so.

ROS-Industrial Training and Conference 2016: schedule now online

fraunhofer izs - Institute center stuttgart

Check out the exciting schedule for the upcoming ROS-Industrial Training and Conference 2016, to be held Nov 2-4 at Fraunhofer IPA in Stuttgart, Germany. For this year's edition of the Conference we have the pleasure to host two keynote speakers. During the first day Brian Gerkey, CEO and founder of the Open Source Robotics Foundation, will recap the history of ROS and share with the audience how advanced robotics is performed during "the era of open-source software". During the second day Prof. Michael Beetz from the University of Bremen will illustrate how knowledge-based services such as openEASE can improve interoperability in robotics and lower the barriers for robot programming. The training session has been updated as well, with our colleagues at FH Aachen delivering a full day of hands-on ROS training, and ROS-Industrial Consortium Europe members PPM AS and IT+Robotics srl providing FlexGui and cROS training during the second day. Please note that there is a significant discount if you register (registration now closed) for both events, and a further reduction for ROS-Industrial Consortium members. See you in Stuttgart on November 2-4!

RIC-EU Annual Newsletter - June 2016

It is with great pleasure that I announce the public availability of the latest edition of the RIC-EU newsletter. Many thanks to all contributors!

Team Delft's ROS-I powered entry wins the APC 2016

We are happy to announce that Team Delft, a team of scientists and engineers from the TU Delft Robotics Institute and Delft Robotics, won the 2016 edition of the Amazon Picking Challenge which has just been held in Leipzig, Germany. The challenge, which you can read about here, aims to automate the "first and last miles of logistics". The task challenged robots to pick objects from containers and put them on shelves (the "stow task") and to pick objects from stocked shelves and put them into containers (the "pick task"). The variety of the objects and the unstructured environment still make this a considerably difficult task.

Calibrating the system

Picking the dumbbell

More information is available on RoboValley's announcement of the victory. Stay tuned for more in-depth posts going over the technical details of this ROS-Industrial success story!

ROS-Industrial at RoboBusiness Europe 2016

The European edition of RoboBusiness is growing and quickly becoming an interesting event for "all things robotics" in Europe, from innovative research to new products. Following ROS-Industrial's participation at last year's edition, we had a strong presence at the event which took place June 1-3 in Odense, Denmark.

As RIC-EU Program Manager I presented "ROS-Industrial: bringing open-source robotics innovation to the factory floor". In the same track, Prof. Martijn Wisse from TU Delft, scientific advisor to RIC-EU, spoke about "Increasing the application of robotics and automation in EU". Together we conveyed the concept of using the ROS-Industrial platform as 1) a technology enabler to cross the "valley of death", i.e., the gap between the level of technical maturity at which academic research can bring robot technology and the level required to start its industrial application and commercialization; and 2) an open-source accelerator for the development of advanced robotic applications. As the platform evolves and incorporates new features, it can become for robotics something akin to what Android is for smartphones, that is, a very powerful technology enabler. ROS and ROS-Industrial are now on the radar of most actors in the robotics arena, so ROS(-I)'s maturation into the de-facto standard open-source software platform for robotics is well underway.

ROS-Industrial was also well represented at the exhibition. RIC-EU member BlueWorkforce showcased its Ragnar robot and platform, while Team Delft demonstrated their ROS-I powered entry to the 2016 Amazon Picking Challenge, which has just four weeks to go until the competition takes place in Leipzig, Germany. Best of luck, Team Delft!

It is remarkable that Henrik Christensen, professor at Georgia Tech and director of the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines, mentioned ROS-Industrial as a noteworthy initiative which he praised as an effort towards much-needed standardization of robotics software. Such standardization is a necessary prerequisite to enable more and more advanced applications of robotics technology.

See you at RoboBusiness Europe 2017, April 20-21 in Delft, the Netherlands!

Legal aspects and best practices of open-source

On April 19-20 Fraunhofer IPA hosted an event organized in collaboration with euRobotics AISBL on the best practices and legal aspects of Open-Source Software (OSS) in robotics and automation. The rationale behind the event was that while OSS is an established and accepted factor in "software-heavy" business domains like enterprise IT systems and smartphones, its inner workings are less understood in industries where software in now shifting from a component with ancillary role to one with high added-value. With the changes poised to happen in industrial robotics and automation by the advances in robotics science on one hand (just think of the progress in autonomous driving and its underpinning achievements in perception, planning, control) and by government-mandated initiatives like Industrie4.0 on the other, the ROS-Industrial team believes that OSS is a great opportunity to accelerate this process. However, to foster its adoption we understandably need to identify and clear also non-technical obstacles such as possible legal, economic and regulatory aspects.

During the event the speakers described to the audience how OSS is already part of established business practices at large companies in the industrial domain; how digital economies are being shaped thanks also to OSS; which regulatory and legal aspects we need to take into account in terms of safety standards, licensing and compliance processes.

Takeaway messages that we want to highlight as they are instrumental in removing unfounded but long-standing critiques of OSS for industrial robots and machinery are:

• the kind of functionalities that ROS is typically used for, and which sit at the OS/middleware and the application software levels, can be carried out by non-certified software as they live in a "sandbox" protected by the underlying safety-compliant foundation and which includes the electrical/mechanical and safety device/PLC level layers. As I like to say, we do not necessarily aim to replace the software in your robot's control box with ROS (although the software to do that is available), but rather to provide higher-level functionalities like perception-driven, online trajectory generation to let the robot operate in dynamic environments, thing not possible (or very difficult to perform) with the limited sets of preprogrammed motions typical of current automation
• OSS has a long history of adoption in industrial automation; Linux (especially Linux RT) is a good example of this, and shows that using OSS in commercial products is not only possible, but also beneficial
• having a compliance process in place (e.g. OpenChain) can ensure that licensing matters are properly dealt with

Given the interest and the feedback collected after the event, we plan on following-up on these topics at the ROS-Industrial Conference next fall, whose program will be made available in the coming weeks.

Get the Legal and Economic Scoop for OSS in Robotics & Automation

As the technical value of Open-Source Software (OSS) is gaining acceptance in Industrial Robotics and Automation, our daily interaction with the key stakeholders operating in this field (OEMs, system integrators, startups, end users) has made us realize that the limiting factor to its further diffusion lies elsewhere. If Linux is a widely used and respected choice in IT, what is preventing open-source robotics frameworks to becoming accepted to the same extent in our field?

In our experience, current concerns are mostly centered around:

• Legal aspects: what are the implications in terms of liability of using OSS in my products, installations, and plants? How do the different open-source licensing schemes work?
• Economics concerns: can I build a sustainable business model over Open Source? Is my intellectual property at risk?

To help answer these questions and to support potential adopters of OSS in their decision process, Fraunhofer IPA and euRobotics AISBL is offering an event on April 19-20 in Stuttgart, Germany featuring selected speakers providing insight from the technical, economic and legal domains. It is a one-of-a-kind chance to get a comprehensive overview of these aspects and, even more importantly, get answers to your questions and voice your concerns.

For more information, including a detailed program and registration info, please refer to the following webpage.

I look forward to welcoming you in Stuttgart!

Your RIC-EU Program Manager,
Mirko Bordignon

FlexGui by PPM AS offers an open-source intuitive interface for robot control

Following the announcement made at the last RIC-EU Members Meeting, PPM AS released a significant part of its FlexGui software package as open-source. FlexGui, which is now part of the ROS-Industrial project, is an easy-to-configure interface originally developed for the control panel of Nachi robots. Its latest release runs on any browser-equipped device, including industrial PCs and tablets, making it also suitable for remote supervision. ROS-integration makes it now possible to control through FlexGui the wide range of platforms supported by ROS, and its factory designer functionality makes it appealing for production scenarios rich of sensors and other networked devices, such as those envisioned by the Industrie 4.0 initiative.

In case you missed the FlexGui demo at the last RIC-EU event held at Fraunhofer IPA in January, you can hear the presentation by Laszlo Nagy from PPM AS given during the last Community Meeting. Click here for the recording. PPM AS will be present at the RIC-Americas Annual Meeting.

Video: Community Meeting 23 February 2016

RIC-Europe Event Recap: Tech Demo & 2016 Members Meeting

Thanks to all the participants who made the 2016 RIC-EU tech demo and members meeting a success! On Jan 28-29, Fraunhofer IPA, the managing organization of the ROS-Industrial Consortium Europe, welcomed more than 50 participants to the annual RIC-EU members meeting. ROS technology continues to mature and find its way into commercial products and industrial applications, which was shown during a technology demonstration session.

Martin Hägele welcomes the guests to the tech demo session

Participants had the chance to see for themselves what ROS technology can do in terms of easing robot programming; extending the applicability of commercial software platforms through standard interfaces; allowing for hardware-independent intuitive touch interfaces; and powering next-gen robot hardware.

the tech demos kindly provided by IT+robotics srl, ppm as, fraunhofer IPa and blue workforce a/s

After introductory talks, the attendees enjoyed individual presentations, and were able to interact with the presenters and fellow attendees during an open-floor format. The day ended with a social event.

The members' meeting held Jan 29 is an annual gathering of members for an overview of activities during the previous year and current initiatives. Presentations about efforts similar to ROS-I targeting other domains were given. The SiLA initiative aims at similar standardization efforts, but for lab automation equipment; the Machinekit project, which is undergoing interesting development, can make in the future Machinekit+ROS a full stack covering all of your robotics-related needs, from bare metal up to the user interface. This "sister" project raised considerable interest for its potential, especially for hardware designers in need of a means to interface with ROS. More updates will be available on rosindustrial.org, as integration efforts continue.

the RIC-EU members meeting, held on the second day of the event

Attendees enjoyed presentations from RIC-EU's scientific advisor, Martijn Wisse from TU Delft, and Mirko Bordignon from Fraunhofer IPA on ROS infrastructure further development for industrial use thanks to public funding. Ingo Luetkebohle from Bosch, which recently joined RIC-EU, provided an overview of ROS activities at his organization, while Paul Evans from the Southwest Research Institute briefed the attendees on the North American ROS-I Consortium.

The meeting ended with an open discussion, which provided inputs for the ongoing technology roadmapping activity. This will continue at the upcoming RIC-NA members meeting, and will set the schedule for the technical developments of ROS-I during 2016.

For your reference, the detailed agenda of the whole event can be found here.

ROS-I training at Fraunhofer IPA

At the 5th edition of the ROS-Industrial training workshop, held at Fraunhofer IPA in Stuttgart, Germany, attendees from both industry and academia were given a general introduction to the ROS concept, structure and tools, to then receive hands-on training on three separate sessions covering perception, manipulation, and navigation.

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the general introduction to ROS

the manipulation hands-on session

hands-on session on navigation, using the rob@work platform

learning how to use the PCL for perception tasks

The workshop was followed by an overview of current activities of the ROS-Industrial Consortium Europe. We are happy about the feedback that we received, and as ROS(-Industrial) awareness and usage spreads, we are preparing for more in-depth training workshops to be delivered in 2016. You can find the dates of the next training sessions in the calendar of upcoming events.

ROS-I has strong presence at highly attended ROSCon 2015

The ROS-Industrial Initiative had a strong presence at the last edition of ROSCon, the ROS developers' conference, which was held on October 3-4 in Hamburg, Germany, right after IROS. This ROSCon, the fourth since the inaugural edition in 2012, was particularly significant as the available registration slots sold out weeks before the event. The organizers, the OSRF, managed to fit more than 350 people at the conference venue, which spread over two buildings at the University of Hamburg, right in the heart of the city.

the exhibition and refreshments area

mark shuttleworth from canonical delivering a great talk on commercial models for the robotics business

Not only was attendance a record high, but a quick "raise your hands" poll among the participants showed that the overwhelming majority was attending ROScon for the first time. This is a clear sign that ROS is quickly raising interest outside its original development community, which confirms our strong belief that it can be of great value for the broader robotics and automation world. The scheduled and lightning talks showcased a great variety of use cases and technical developments, such as autonomous driving as well as automated warehouses. ROS-Industrial was represented with members from both the Consortia attending and delivering talks, in addition to providing information about the initiative to conference participants visiting our booth at the exhibitor area.

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the joint presentation from RIC-Americas and RIC-Europe

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welcoming visitors to our booth!

the ros-industrial booth

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the 5th ros-industrial community meeting was held at roscon 2015

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During the second birds-of-a-feather session the 5th ROS-Industrial community meeting was held, during which we discussed driver development, the upcoming FTPs, and the details on how to join the online developers meeting. We would like to thank all participants for contributing to an interesting discussion!

This was probably the ROSCon edition marking the de facto acceptance of ROS as the robotics software "tool of choice" for practitioners in academia and industry. It was very interesting to discuss with participants how the robotics landscape is evolving, and rest assured that we at ROS-Industrial are closely following such developments: please refer to our upcoming events schedule to see for yourself what an exciting year lies ahead.

Company Spotlight: HumaRobotics

If you follow ROS-related news you probably noticed that packages were contributed back in May to interface ROS systems to the Cognex In-Sight camera and to Siemens S7 PLCs via Modbus TCP communication. Generation Robots, the company behind these contributions, is in fact not new to ROS development, as its CEO Jérôme Laplace told us.

Generation Robots' R&D branch HumaRobotics worked over the years with ROS on platforms such as NAO from Aldebaran, Baxter from Rethink Robotics, Q.bo from Thecorpora and DARwIn-OP / DARwIn-Mini from Robotis. Their staff of cognitive science PhDs and robotics engineers provides ROS-based solutions both on real robots and during simulation. For example, the CEA (French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission) has sought their expertise on the DARwIn-OP and PhantomX robots for usage in inspection, radioactive material handling and disaster relief scenarios. An outcome of this collaboration has been to provide the community with simulation packages for both robots in the Gazebo simulator, user friendly ROS APIs and custom walking algorithms.

DarWin-op gazebo model

phantomx gazebo model

HumaRobotics helps industrial collaborators by sharing their expertise in human-robot interaction to bring collaborative capabilities to the ROS-enabled Baxter: for instance, by enabling it with speech recognition and synthesis, adaptive dialog abilities, human posture detection and natural face-to-face interaction with an operator. They also make use of advanced machine learning techniques to provide fast and natural inverse kinematics for physical interaction between the robot and the human (tool passing, third-hand).

baxter performing an inspection task with aN ARM-mounted cognex camera

safe human-robot interaction with the baxter collaborative robot

"Industrial scenarios often involve integrating robots with standard industrial devices and protocols. ROS-enabled robots do not always have such capabilities by default, but one of the strengths of ROS is how easy it can be extended with new functionalities", Laplace said. "Due to its community-driven nature and the wide range of existing functionality, ROS is really enabling fast development of advanced robotic systems".

To join HumaRobotics in the fast-growing community of ROS(-Industrial) adopters and speed up the prototyping and development of industrial robot applications, download the code. Contact ROS-I (Americas, Europe) to better understand what the ROS-Industrial Consortia can do for you!