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.

ROS-Industrial at Automate 2013

As if in celebration of our one-year anniversary, ROS-I showcased it’s capabilities at the Automate 2013 conference/exposition in Chicago last week. Check out the picture below.

We had a great spot at the front of the expo floor,and over the course of the show, hundreds of people stopped by to satisfy their curiosity about ROS-I. The main attraction was the ROS-I Interoperability Demo which consisted of a work cell enclosed by plexiglass which contained two robot arms: one Yaskawa Motoman SIA20d and one Universal Robots UR5. The robots collaborated to sort a cluttered pile of objects. The process involved one robot (the UR) singulating a part from a cluttered pile of parts,recognizing the part from 3D data, and the second robot (the Motoman) placing the part in a designated zone according to the classification of the part. Once all parts from the cluttered area were sorted, the process was reversed, with one robot passing parts back to the other robot, which placed the part on a ramp. The parts slid down the ramp and piled up randomly at the bottom, which was intended to show that the parts were not pre-positioned in the clutter. This showcased the on-the-fly path planning which was based entirely on the vision system (two PrimeSense camera’s). Every grasp was planned based on camera sensor data. Each robot was aware of every object in its environment prior to moving to pick or place a part. The ultimate goal was to promote ROS-Industrial, which leverage’s the open-source benefits of ROS, such as utilizing cutting-edge university research, and enabling communication to multiple robot types, in order to solve complex real-world problems.

Set up the night before - ROS-I open to/for everyone

ROS-I, run, don’t walk, to see this demo

Two robots, one program, ROS-Industrial

3D visualization with live data

ROS-I Repository: Year in Review

We launched the ROS-Industrial™ (ROS-I™) repository in January, 2012. As we approach this first anniversary of the repository, we thought you might be interested to know how ROS-I has expanded and how it is being embraced internationally.

Here are some of the noteworthy ROS-I stories from 2012:

• ROS-I was featured in a dozen articles by industry periodicals including IEEE Spectrum, Design News, and Technology Review.
• ROS-I was the topic of presentations at the ECHORD workshop at ICRA, RoboBusiness Leadership Summit, ROSCon, and Robotics Industry Forum.
• Fraunhofer IPA dedicated a conference, held in Stuttgart Germany, to ROS-Industrial.
• We were invited to exhibit ROS-I at Automate 2013 in January (next week).
• ROS-I now interoperates with robots from five manufacturers: Motoman, Adept, Universal Robots, ABB, and Fanuc.
• ROS-I supports industrial peripherals including Robotiq grippers, EtherCAT field devices, 2D and 3D sensors.
• More than half of the code in the ROS-I repository were generated by users.
• NIST funded 2 projects that enhance ROS-I: a Human Tracker, and MT Connect/ROS Bridge.
• ROS-Industrial Consortium Americas announced its charter members.
• Fraunhofer IPA announced its intent to spearhead a ROS-Industrial Consortium Europe.
• An aerospace company is leveraging ROS-I for on-the-fly path planning for painting and for off-line planning for edge processing.
• We moved our web site to a new domain: ROSindustrial.org
• ROS-Industrial Consortium Americas will host its first meeting in San Antonio, TX, on 3/7/13.

How you can benefit from ROS-I? You can benefit from ROS-I in many ways. First, with some programming savvy, you can use it yourself for free to solve your manufacturing robotics problems. Because it is BSD licensed, you may keep your code proprietary if you wish. If you would like help/support in learning and using ROS-I, you can join the ROS-Industrial Consortium. Through the Consortium, you can solve your non-proprietary challenges by pooling your resources with other members to fund a Focused Technical Project. These projects are a low-cost way to build capabilities that meet your near-term needs. Lastly, if you need help with a proprietary automation application that requires the advanced capabilities of ROS-I, you can contract a ROS-I system integrator directly to create a customized turn-key solution.

CloPeMa Project Leverages ROS-Industrial

CloPeMa, Clothes Perception and Manipulation, is a European project to research the  manipulation of clothing and other textiles with industrial robots.  The ultimate vision of the program is to autonomously fold “any" kind of clothing.  The grasping and manipulation of flexible objects is a non-trivial problem.  This makes the CloPeMa very exciting.  The research will definitely push the state of the art in robotic grasping and manipulation.  

Five partners are working together on this program:

• Czech Technical University (CVUT), Czech, Republic  is performing industrial robot integration and depth data analysis
• University of Glasgow (UG), United Kingdom is developing the 3D vision hardware.
• Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH), Greece is performing project management and developing intelligent planning of actions software.
• Neovision s.r.o. (NEO), NEO, Czech Republic) is performing system integration.
• University of Genova (UNIGE), Italy  developing a state of the artl gripper with tactile and optic sensing.

CTU is utilizing ROS-Industrial to control two Motoman, MA1400 industrial robots.  They are expanding the capability in the Motoman stack to enable multi-robot control.  New capabilities will include the ability two move multiple manipulators at the same time.  The software developed under the CloPeMa project will be released open source.

Further information can be found at the following sites:

Official CloPeMa website

EU-FP7 Project website

ROS-Industrial at ROSCon 2012

This news is a little delayed, but with summer vacations and too much fun coding, time got away from me.  For those of you who didn’t get to attend ROSCon, ROS-Industrial, generated some buzz.

Morgan Quigley, the original architect of ROS, recognized ROS-Industrial in “The Photo Gallery of Robot Awesomeness” portion of his keynote address at the conference. He called ROS-Industrial a solution blending the “cutting-edge, high-level features” of ROS with the “rock-solid, low-level controls” associated with industrial robots, explaining that “the idea of ROS-Industrial is to combine these two worlds to try to get the best of both.”

Another keynote by Steven W. Hart from the joint GM-NASA Robonaut development team called ROS-Industrial a more robust version of ROS, “really pushing in the right direction in terms of adding the reliability, the testing, the performance … characterizing what works and what doesn’t.”
 
“Shaun Edwards came… to Willow Garage to… see what we were doing with our manipulation stack and apply it to industrial robots,” explained Willow Garage’s Sachin Chita, during a talk titled, Motion Planning in ROS. “And it was actually a fantastic effort.” He played a video of ROS-Industrial controlling a Motoman robot, performing collision-free grasping of multiple objects of different shapes and materials.

I’m very thankful for the kind mentions about ROS-Industrial at ROSCon.  I think it goes without saying that ROS-Industrial, a team effort in and of itself, is an extension of ROS, for which many deserve credit.

ROS-Industrial Program Update

I thought I would take some time to provide an update on the current state of ROS-Industrial.

Consortium - The ROS-Industrial Consortium is one step closer. We have put some preliminary information out of the web (http://www.swri.org/4org/d10/msd/automation/ros-industrial-consortium.htm) and have created a video ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h54YzGIZFt4 ). We are very excited for this opportunity to expand the support for ROS-Industrial. Feel free to share this information with anybody you think might have interest.

Twitter - We’ve created a twitter account for ROS-Industrial: http://twitter.com/rosindustrial Follow us for status updates. We will be posting videos, articles, and other information as it becomes available.

Freetail Program - We have talked to several companies that have identified “bin picking" or “kitting" as opportunities of interest. As a result, we have approved another round of funding for refining and impoving pick and place capability. The software developed under this program (code named Freetail) will be released open source ( http://code.google.com/p/swri-ros-pkg/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk%2Ffreetail ). We are actively looking for commercial partners and others to assist in this research.

Mini-Project List - I have updated the mini project list on the google code wiki (http://ros.org/wiki/Industrial/Roadmap/ ). I would like to invite you guys to give us feedback on the list. Additions are also welcome. This list will be included as potential projects for funding by the Consortium once it is funded. If you have a particular need or project idea, this might be a possible way to get it developed.

Volunteer Opportunities - We are still feeling our way out on managing ROS-Industrial as an open source program. We truly believe that community involvement will be the key to it’s success. For those who might be interested, I would like to know if there are volunteers to create robot configurations for the various types of industrial robots. We have tutorials on the wiki. By simply generating these configuration files, we can give people the ability to test high level functions, such as path planning, using the Rviz visualization environment.