ROS-Industrial Forum Recap and References

We appreciated the participation from the approximately 70 people who attended the ROS-Industrial Forum web event today, Dec. 5th. We are grateful to the presenters from Alten Mechatronics, Canada's NRC, CAT, TU Delft, Fraunhofer IPA, GA Tech, LANL, SwRI, and Yaskawa Motoman who provided the community with updates on progress and called for additional ROS-Industrial capabilities.

The event was recorded and can be replayed by going to this link. The slides are also available upon request.

Alten Mechatronics Unstructured Box Palletizing with ROS-Industrial

Alten Mechatronics, in collaboration with CSi Palletising systems, developed a demonstrator using an ABB IRB6640 robot to show that a system based on ROS-Industrial can easily cope with unknown products and uncertainties in the environment. Very little setup time was required for the actual hardware.

Two pallets were placed in the workspace of the robot. On one of these pallets three boxes of unknown size were randomly placed. The size, position and orientation of the boxes were determined using a Kinect, the Openni package and the PCL library. Based on this information, a path was calculated by MoveIt! and was then sent to the robot controller using the ABB ROS-Industrial package.

To make offline testing of the connection between the ROS-pc and the ABB motion controller possible, Alten Mechatronics developed a setup in which a ROS-pc was connected to a pc running the official ABB ABB RobotStudio software. This reduced the hardware set up time to less than one day. The current implementation reached a grasping accuracy of approximately 1cm, which indicates the accuracy of the vision system can be improved. This can be done by using more accurate sensors (e.g., laser triangulation, Time of Flight cameras) and more advanced filtering algorithms. For this demonstrator, the existing ABB drivers had to be adapted to allow controlling the gripper using the I/O interface of the IRC5 controller, which indicates a the need for a standardized Robot I/O interface in ROS-Industrial, to make implementation even easier.

By: Berend Kupers, Alten Mechatronics. Contact: rosindustrial(at-sign)alten.nl

October ROS-I Consortium Americas Meeting Recap

The fall meeting of the ROS-Industrial Consortium Americas was held in conjunction with RoboBusiness on Oct. 23, 2013, in Santa Clara, California. Paul Hvass and Shaun Edwards (SwRI) provided updates about the growth of the Consortium, ongoing technical projects, and financial outlook for the Consortium. Next, there was a set of lightning talks by William Woodall (Open Source Robotics Foundation) about the status of ROS, by Sachin Chitta (SRI) about MoveIt!, and by Ulrich Reiser (Fraunhofer IPA) about the formation of the ROS-Industrial Consortium Europe. The group also considered new Focused Technical Projects (FTPs). The group deliberated about a MoveIt! FTP proposed by SRI and a Robotic Deburring FTP championed by Spirit AeroSystems. A significant achievement of the meeting was a broadening of representative end user OEMs to include aerospace, automotive, and heavy industries along with the robot OEMs and researchers. More than 30 attendees came in person or via WebEx from ABB Robotics, BMW, Boeing, Canada’s NRC, CAT, Cessna, Deere and Co., Fraunhofer IPA, HDT, LANL, NIST, OmnicO AGV, OSRF, Robotiq, Spirit AeroSystems, SRI, SwRI, Toyota, UTARI, Vetex, and Yaskawa Motoman Robotics.

ROS-Industrial – MTConnect Integration Program Completes

This work was conducted under Grant Opportunity Number 2012-NIST-MSE-01 for the Intelligent Systems Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in collaboration with AMT (Association for Manufacturing Technology), Mazak USA, NCDMM (National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining), SwRI (Southwest Research Institute), and System Insights.

Program Summary

The ROS-Industrial – MTConnect Integration program, completed this past summer, had a goal to create a bridge between the MTConnect and ROS-Industrial and demonstrate the capability with a robotic machine tending application. Similar to ROS messaging, MTConnect is a standard that describes both the symantic data definition and method of communication between devices in a manufacturing environment. The ROS-Industrial/MTConnect bridge allows devices that use either comms/messaging system to communicate seamlessly. The practical application of the bridge is to create plug-and-play capability between MTConnect devices and any robot that is supported by ROS-Industrial. The final deliverable for the program was a machine tending demonstration with a ROS-Industrial-controlled robot (Fanuc) and a MTConnect-controlled CNC (Mazac CNC Lathe). The MTConnect standard pre-defined the communications and system interactions between the robot and CNC, allowing an integration with significantly less programming than would be required from a traditional implementation. (for more information see the video below).

Importance to ROS-Industrial

While the final demonstration of the program may not be a new application, the real value in this program was to provide a method for ROS-Industrial devices to communicate with other devices (even other ROS-Industrial devices) using an industry standard. With this capability, the vision of a factory floor with intelligent industrial systems all communicating and interacting seamlessly could be realized. This is a capability that is not traditionally supported by ROS. There have been efforts at creating a multi-master system, but these efforts are not appropriate for an industrial application. Such approaches require every system to be ROS-aware which is not practical for all the systems in an industrial environment. Many devices are too simple for the overhead of ROS. Thus MTConnect provides a pragmatic solution for device-to-device communications.

In addition to this important capability, several ancillary capabilities were developed or prototyped as part of this effort.

• Robot Task Description Format (RTDF) – A standard ROS format for capturing robot moves and way-points in a human-readable format.
• Standard Control System State Machine and GUI – The vast majority of industrial control systems follow very similar behavioral concepts, including common states such as idle, waiting, in-process, stopped, reset, etc... With the adoption of common states, a similar GUI structure emerges. While these concepts are not new, powerful tools like those available with ROS-I now allow developers to take advantage of them.

The ROS-Industrial - MTConnect Integration Program provided many benefits to the ROS-Industrial program, including new capabilities and a real world demonstration of a robotic machine tending application. We are excited to see how others will build upon these new capabilities for their own applications.

Factory-in-a-Day

Fraunhoffer IPA posted a press release about the Factory-in-a-Day project that was recently awarded by the European Union as part of the FP7 program Factory of the Future. The program technical goals are well aligned with the goals of ROS-Industrial, and ROS-Industrial technologies will be a key part of the implementation strategies. We expect to see some new capabilities pushed back to the ROS-Industrial repository as a result of the effort.

Factory-in-a-Day

Whether it is the packing and quality checking of fruit, the polishing of steel moulds or the filling of a spray-painting machine, all these processes have one thing in common: they are usually done manually. The reason for this is that no robot or automated process is available for these tasks that can do the job as well and as efficiently as a human worker. Currently, setting up a robotic system for these complex tasks can take months and the costs involved are prohibitive. SMEs usually only have small production batches due to seasonal on-off production, which means these large investments rarely pay off. State-of-the-art systems do not provide the flexibility they need to stay competitive in a global market. For these reasons SMEs in Europe hardly use advanced robot technology. Continue reading on Fraunhofer's website.

TU Delft, an active contributor to ROS-Industrial, is leading the effort. Here is a link to their announcement.

BMW AG: RIC Americas Member of the Week

BMW AG joined the ROS-Industrial Consortium to show its support for the use of ROS in automotive manufacturing processes and as communication infrastructure for cyber-physical products. BMW AG is currently using ROS in predevelopment departments within the production and car-research area. Related projects have a focus on mobile robotics, highly-automated driving and the evaluation of ROS-I for different industrial manufacturing applications and robot systems. We welcome BMW AG’s participation in the Consortium.

“ROS is a great example in research of how one common infrastructure for a large variety of different applications and platforms can increase both functionality and reusability of robotics at the same time. BMW AG envisions ROS-I as a bridge between manufacturing R&D and existing factory automation. We are convinced that this Consortium will help to identify industrial needs, increase the availability of drivers and bring ROS and its benefits closer to real industrial (every-day) applications.”

ROS Gains Momentum

For those coming from a factory automation background, you may have only recently heard about ROS, the open source Robot Operating System. In the past, various “universal” robot software packages have come and gone, but if you are concerned that ROS is just the next flash in the pan -- think again!

A few weeks ago, the Open Source Robotics Foundation, curators of ROS, posted the yearly statistics for the ROS community. The numbers speak for themselves:

• 11,000 unique IP addresses downloaded ROS packages in the month of August, compare to 8,100 last year
• 748 total publications have cited the seminal 2009 M. Quigley et al paper about ROS, more than two times the 2012 statistics
• 22,700 page-views-per-day average on ROS.org in August
• 32,500 thousand unique .deb packages downloaded in August
• 1.6 million total ROS .deb packages downloaded in August

ROS is not going away; it has just hit its stride and is growing rapidly. The graph below is from last year, but it captures the trend:

Graph of publicly released and indexed ROS repositories, 2008 to 2012

Researchers at Auburn, AMT, Berkeley, Brown, CCNY, CERTH, CTU Prague, CMU, CNRC, CWRU, ETH Zurich, Fraunhofer IPA, Freiberg U., GA Tech, Johns Hopkins U., LAAS-CNRS, LANL, MIT, NASA, NCDMM, NIST, NREC, NRL, Oregon State, Osnabruck U., OSRF, Politecnico di Milano, RWTH Aachen U., Sandia Nat. Labs, Stanford, SwRI, SRI, Technalia, TU Catalonia, TU Darmstadt, TU Delft, TU Munich, U. Arizona, U. Bremen, UC Boulder, U. Genova, U. Glasgow, U. Kassel, U. Koblenz, U. Padova, U. Penn, UT Austin, U. Toronto, U. Tuebingen, UTARI, U. Tokyo, U. Wurzburg, Warsaw TU, Washington U. St. Louis, and Willow Garage have tapped into ROS. And this condensed list neglects the equally numerous for-profit research labs using ROS! Check out the ROS 5-Yrs. montage video, which captures the notable accomplishments using ROS.

Great advances in robotics are happening on the ROS platform, so wouldn’t it make sense to have an industrial version of ROS that works with existing factory automation hardware? There is! It is called ROS-Industrial and while it is only in its second year of deployment, it already works with ABB, Adept, Fanuc, Motoman, and Universal robots. Check out the ROS-I 1-Yr. montage video to see our first year’s accomplishments. Come out to meet ROS/ROS-I pioneers at our next event: Oct. 23-25 in Santa Clara at RoboBusiness!

NIST: RIC Americas Member of the Week

Founded in 1901 and now part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, National Institutes for Standards and Technology (NIST) is one of the nation's oldest physical science laboratories. The Next-Generation Robotics and Automation Program within the Intelligent Systems Division at NIST has many areas of research focus that overlap with capabilities being developed in ROS-Industrial: Part Grasping and Assembly, Safety of Human-Robot Systems, Robot Perception for Identifying and Locating Parts for Assembly, Robot Perception for Workspace Situational Awareness.

For NIST, consortia such as the RIC provide a key mechanism for engaging with industry to carry out its mission and advance robot capabilities, particularly for manufacturing applications, through consensus definition and understanding of the requirements for advanced applications.

NIST has already leveraged ROS-Industrial for two projects – An MTConnect and ROS-I Integrated Robotic Workcell and Human Tracking for automation safety. MTConnect is a standard interface for controllers of machining equipment, such as CNC mills and lathes. ROS-Industrial provides a unified software platform for industrial robots. The goal of this project was to create a software layer that will provide a generic bridge between the MTConnect and ROS-Industrial interface standards. A final demonstration consisted of an industrial robot loading raw material into a simulated CNC lathe and unloading finished product. For the second project, NIST is evaluating a prototype sensor system for the purpose of detecting and tracking humans in industrial environments. No standards exist for either measuring the performance or certifying the applicability of perception technologies for detecting and tracking people in such dynamic and unstructured environments. Reliably detecting and tracking movements of nearby workers on the factory floor is crucial to ensuring safety around ever more cooperative manufacturing automation. Future blog posts will provide more detail about the MTConnect and Human Tracker projects.

ABB: RIC Americas Member of the Week

We are planning to post a highlight of each ROS-I Consortium Americas member explaining a little more about there role in the robotics community and their interest in ROS-Industrial. We begin this week with ABB.

ABB Corporate Research Center, USA

ABB Robotics is a leading supplier of industrial robots, modular manufacturing systems and integration services. They provide a comprehensive range of robots to help manufacturers improve productivity, product quality and worker safety. The IRB 2400 and 5400 were the first two ABB robots to be integrated with ROS-Industrial. A ROS-I enabled IRB 2400 was recently used to develop the MTConnect Bridge in collaboration with NIST (more about MTConnect in a future post).

ABB is excited to join and have stated: “ABB Robotics' future success depends on understanding emerging trends, including new methods of programming robots and industrial automation equipment. To maintain an innovative edge, our products should be able to interface with cutting edge programming platforms so that our research and development teams and partners won't be limited in their creativity or ability to solve challenges.”

ROS-Industrial Consortium Americas members' meeting October 23

The ROS-Industrial Consortium Americas invites you to join the action from 9 a.m. to noon on Wednesday, October 23, 2013, at RoboBusiness in Santa Clara, CA. Attendees will get the inside scoop on:

• The progress of ROS-Industrial: MTConnect Bridge, support for new robots, and integration with MoveIt!
• Consortium activities, financials, membership, and the progress of RIC Europe
• Consortium roadmap presentation and voting
• Available Focused Technical Projects

There are a number of other ROS and ROS-Industrial related events that you will find at RoboBusiness:

• ROS-I Consortium Panel Discussion: ROS-Industrial will be the topic of a panel discussion during the Agile Manufacturing Workshop. The panel will consist of industry leaders who will discuss current industry trends and opportunities and how ROS-I can accelerate implementation of next generation industrial solutions -- 2 p.m. on October 23.
• ROS Matures and Looks Ahead: A presentation by Ryan Gariepy, CTO and Co-Founder of Clearpath Robotics -- 2:45 p.m. on October 24
• Building Industrial Robots for Dynamic Response: A presentation by Clay Flannigan, Manager of Robotics and Automation Engineering, Southwest Research Institute -- 1:30 p.m. on October 25
• Marrying ROS to External Software: A presentation by Tully Foote, ROS Platform Manager, Open Source Robotics Foundation -- 2:15 p.m. on October 25
• SwRI/ROS-Industrial Exhibitor Booth #328: meet in person with SwRI ROS-I experts

Registration is required. Please contact Paul Hvass (paul.hvass@swri.org) for a registration promotional code for early bird pricing of $895 (regardless of registration date) that will alert the event organizers that you plan to attend the Consortium meeting. If you are not currently a Consortium member but are considering membership, please contact us.

ROS-I Focused Technical Projects

Focused Technical Projects enable full members of the ROS-Industrial Consortium to stretch their manufacturing engineering dollars through collaborative research and development. Through FTPs, members can pool resources to solve common problems, thereby, developing more general-purpose solutions at lower cost. And because these topics are driven by members' needs, ROS-I will continue to grow and adapt to solve an ever-broader set of real-world challenges.

SwRI has successfully secured internal funding to participate in at least two Focused Technical Projects as an equal contributor. SwRI will apply this funding to the first projects that achieve critical mass. Current topics include demonstration projects for proceses such as weld grinding, deburring, and mobile manipulation for large workpieces (see illustration). New FTP topics can be submitted at any time.

Current Consortium Focused Technical Projects

To learn more about a particular potential project, including detailed scope and cost, please contact Paul Hvass.

Jenkins System for ROS-Industrial Repositories

As the ROS-Industrial open source project adds support for more robot vendors and grows larger with more active contributors, ensuring successful builds and compliance with code quality standards for each new revision is becoming a tedious and time consuming task. Errors introduced by broken revisions may go undetected making it difficult to trace the root cause of issues observed in subsequent revisions. In anticipation of these growing pains, we sought an automatic and efficient solution to this common set of problems found in large software projects. We identified Jenkins to meet this need and it is now deployed for use with our GitHub repositories: ROS-Industrial Jenkins

What Does Jenkins do for the Repo?

The Jenkins system is configured to automatically build the most recent version of several ROS-I repositories and check for any compile errors introduced by changes in the code. Furthermore, it auto-generates analysis reports that expose nonstandard coding practices and bugs that the compiler otherwise ignores.

Here we see the ratio between the code comments and the code itself for the recent commits. It isn't that exciting yet, because Jenkins has just started tracking.

Another helpful report that is auto-generated by Jenkins. 

How do I use it?

Whenever you commit code to the ROS-I repo, the Jenkins system will update its reports.

Do I need to install anything to get it to work?

You don't need to load any new software to browse the reports on the ROS-I repo, but if you wish to see your analytics before commiting the code, or if you simply want to use Jenkins for a private repo, setting up the Jenkins system on your PC is very straight forward and only takes a few simple steps. For specific details on the installation procedure go to github repository

How is the ROS-Industrial Jenkins different than the ROS Jenkins (Build Infrastructure)? 

The ROS Jenkins server (and associated build infrastructure) are used by ROS community to build and deploy debian (binary) releases.  The intended application of the ROS-Industrial Jenkins server is different in the following ways, ROS-Industrial

• allows multiple repo branches to be built against a single ROS release
• is lightweight (only compiles, tests, and profiles; no debian packaging) 
• is customizable and allows users to apply specialized profiling and testing tools (those that are supported by Jenkins)
• is easy to set up, requiring only the installation of Jenkins and the addition of rosinstall files for each job. 

ROS-I Updates: New Webpage, Move to GitHub, and Catkin

We’ve been quiet on our social media outlets for a few weeks now, while significant ROS-I web and repository updates have been happening behind the scenes. These updates include:

• ROSindustrial.org content has moved to the cloud
• ROS-I now uses the git Version Control System (VCS) and the ROS-I repository has moved to GitHub
• We’ve updated all of the ROS-I code that is on GitHub so it works with the Catkin build system 

The webpage move to the cloud allowed us to be more mobile device friendly. Now the menus and small fonts reformat when viewing from a mobile device. We also integrated the ROS-I tumblr blog with the site, so casual visitors are more likely to stumble onto this blog content. You should notice much more frequent blog posts in the future.

New ROSindustrial.org home page

Next, to stay consistent with the ROS community, as of July the ROS-I repository has moved to GitHub and uses git VCS. Significantly, the change to GitHub means that there is tighter control and tracking of code changes, pull requests, and branches, all of which foster code quality and reliability. Since we’ve moved, we’ve seen greater community partipation with forks created by Fraunhofer, GA Tech, TU Delft, and Motoman. For the long list of why GitHub is great choice for a large open source community repo check out this link.

ROS-Industrial GitHub Repository

Lastly, we’ve updated all of the ROS-I core to use the Catkin build system in preparation to more tightly integrate with MoveIt!. Catkin is the new build system introduced with ROS-Groovy. It enables users to more easily cross-compile and it makes ROS more portable. Note that a ROS build package (i.e. rosmake) can depend on a ROS-I Catkin packages, but not the other way around. Go here for more about Catkin.

 

ROS-I Training Class Photos

The ubiquitous group photo outside the training building. In attendance: ABB, August Ninth Analyses, Boeing, CNRC, HDT Robotics, Motoman Robotics, NRL, OSRF, Spirit AeroSystems, SwRI, UTARI, UT Austin NRG.

Jeremy Zoss (left, SwRI) discussing the capstone pick and place lab project.

Shaun Edwards (red shirt, SwRI) in his element explaining how to configure MoveIt! to control the Motoman SIA20D (right robot).

William Woodall (blue shirt at right, OSRF) assisted with the class and taught a session about the Catkin build system. We are grateful for the support from OSRF!

Daniel Solomon (right, SwRI) dissects the theory of operation for the capstone pick and place lab project.

Jorge Nicho (right, SwRI) developed the tutorials for the capstone project.

Shaun Edwards presenting the MTConnect demo application on an ABB robot.

ROS-I swag was free for attendees :)

ROS-I 1-Yr. Montage Video

ROS-Industrial 1-Yr. Montage Video

OSRF to Assist with Teaching the ROS-Industrial Training Class in June

The Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) will participate in the upcoming ROS-Industrial Training Class, June 4-6 (rosindustrial.org/ric/events). OSRF will provide training for the new features and capabilities of the ROS Groovy release, particularly focusing on Catkin, the new software build system. OSRF will be available to respond to questions you may have about the ROS core, past, present, and future.  The class will provide a hands-on introduction to ROS and ROS-Industrial, and it will culminate with hardware integration exercises with live industrial robots and peripherals. The class is FREE to Full/Associate Members of the ROS-Industrial Consortium. Others may attend for a fee.

Please note that class registration is only open until May 18th. We also encourage attendees to buy a small form factor PC to take home after the class. The PC will have Ubuntu, ROS, and ROS-I preinstalled, allowing developers to hit the ground running with ROS-I development.  We are selling the PCs at cost; the first ten buyers will receive them at the sale price that we negotiated. Later units are subject to price change.

ROS-I Training Class June 4-6

We are delighted to invite you to attend the ROS-Industrial Basic Developer’s Training class, which will be held June 4-6, in San Antonio, TX. The class will provide a hands-on introduction to ROS and ROS-Industrial, and it will culminate with hardware integration exercises with live industrial robots and peripherals. The class is FREE to Full/Associate Members of the ROS-Industrial Consortium. Others may attend for a fee. For your convenience, we are also offering for you to purchase the preconfigured small form factor ROS-I PC that you will use during the class (pic below). 

7-29-2013 Note that this event has passed, but you can see pictures here. 

ROS-Industrial Consortium Kickoff Meeting a Success!

We had a successful and productive ROS-Industrial Consortium (RIC) kickoff meeting on March 6^thand 7^th with 25 people representing 14 organizations in attendance. We have posted a brief review of the meeting here. The presentations from the March 6^th RIC Open House have been uploaded to our YouTube channel: ROS-I Consortium. The contents of the March 7^th Member’s meeting are posted on the RIC member’s portal, for those who have joined.

You might be wondering what the next Consortium event will be. We are planning a ROS-Industrial training class that will take place at SwRI June 4^th -6^th. Save the date! It will provide a hands-on introduction to ROS and MoveIt!, and will culminate with hardware integration exercises with live industrial robots and peripherals. It is free for Associate/Full Consortium members (up to three free attendees per organization), and is otherwise $2250/person for non-members or academic/government members. You are welcome to join the Consortium at any time, which is a better value if multiple people attend training from the same organization. We will send out a class registration announcement in the next couple weeks.

ROS Core Transitioning to Able Hands at OSRF

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. 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.

SwRI's ROS-Industrial Interoperability Demonstration at Automate 2013

For the great majority of the world who were unable to attend Automate 2013, check out our video to see what you missed.