RIC-Americas Annual Meeting - 2015

We are announcing the detailed agenda for the ROS-Industrial Consortium Americas annual meeting, which will take place in conjunction with Automate 2015. Note that there is also a pre-meeting dinner on March 26 that is included with your registration.

Time: 8:30 AM - 4:00 PM CST (Chicago time) on Friday, March 27

Place: Palmer House Hilton Hotel, Chicago Room on 5th floor. Only two miles from the McCormick Place convention center in Chicago, IL.

Agenda:

• 0830 Registration/check-in and light breakfast
• 0900 Welcome and Consortium updates
• 0945 ROS-I Roadmap Presentation
• 1000 Break
• 1015 Invited ROS-I Presentations
  • Cessna/CNRC - Robotic Routing
  • Caterpillar - Agile Automation
  • Wolf Robotics - Technology Transfer to Practical Applications
  • UNC - Real-Time Motion Planning & Proximity Computations for Industrial Robots
  • GA Tech - Canonical Robot Command Language
  • Siemens - ROS Simulation for Industrial Applications with Tecnomatix
• 1215 Lunch/Keynote: Fraunhofer IPA - Factory in a Day Project - Reducing System Integration Time to One Day
• 1300 Focused Technical Project Presentations - 2015
  • Robotic Blending Milestone 3: Expedite and Technology Transfer
  • Strategic Project: CAD to ROS Conversion
  • Best of Amazon Picking Challenge
  • On-Line Adaptive Cartesian Path Planner for Collaborative Robotics
• 1400 Breakout discussions about FTPs
• 1500 Lightning talks by Research Members
• 1600 Conclusion

Registration: Registration Link

How many people can we send?

• Full Members - 3
• Associate Members - 2
• Research Members - 1
• Additional Members - $300 EA

Not a member? Join Now

We look forward to seeing you there!

January Community Meeting Highlights

From the meeting host, Ulrich Reiser:

Thank you for participating in today's ROS-Industrial Community Meeting. We had more than 100 people in attendance representing both industry and academia! For those who couldn't make the live event, it is now available on YouTube (below). We are grateful to our presenters:

• Welcome and update on RIC-Americas and EU | Paul Hvass (SwRI), Ulrich Reiser (Fraunhofer IPA)
• Modelling of Realtime Communication Patterns | Arne Hamann (Bosch)
• Descartes Path Planner with Application to Robotic Routing | Shaun Edwards (SwRI)
• Amazon Picking Challenge | Dejan Pangercic (Bosch)
• Why DDS for ROS 2.0? | Dirk Thomas (OSRF)
• MoveIt! New Functionality and Status Update | Sachin Chitta (SRI)

Join us for our next Community Meeting, likely in May around ICRA!

Motoman SDA10F & ROS-Industrial

Cross-posted from the Smart Robotic Systems blog

Author: Frantisek Durovsky

At the Department of Robotics we’ve spent several weeks testing the new ROS-Industrial driver for SDA10F since it’s announcement on Dec 10th 2014. As mentioned in the original post, the driver was developed by Fraunhofer IPA in cooperation with Yaskawa Smart Robotics Center in Japan, Yaskawa Motoman Robotics and is designated to control dual arm Motoman robots. Even though only the hydro version of driver has officially been released so far, we have also scucessfully managed to test the current indigo branch in combination with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

Motoman SDA10F Support and Moveit Config packages follow standard ROS-Industrial naming convention so all config and xacro files are located as usual. Roslaunching “testsda10f.launch“ from “motomansda10f_support“ folder provides simple interface to check basic robot’s model behaviour and orientation of particular axes.

To read the full blog post please browse here: http://www.smartroboticsys.eu/?p=675&lang=en

Application Deadline Extended to January 16: Yaskawa Motoman Offers Robots for Amazon Picking Challenge Teams

Yaskawa Motoman has extended their application deadline for teams who are interested in using consignment Motoman robot hardware to compete in the Amazon Picking Challenge. To apply for a robot, please submit this application form by midnight PST January 16, 2015.

For more information, please refer to the Yaskawa blog post for more details about the offer.

2nd Factory-in-a-Day Newsletter!

We are happy to report that the second Factory-in-a-Day newsletter is posted. Topics covered in this newsletter include:

• Letter from the project Coordinator, Dr. Martijn Wisse, TU Delft
• Workshop on Philips use case
• Spotlight on: Philips
• Do robots kill jobs?

The Factory-in-a-Day project leverages the ROS-I repository, and is supporting improvements and maintenance of the Universal Robots package. As new general factory automation capabilities are created through this project, we anticipate that they will be added to the ROS-I repository.

Demonstration of the Fraunhofer IPA ROS-I Driver for Yaskawa Motoman Dual Arm Robots

Submitted by: Thiago de Freitas and Ulrich Reiser, Fraunhofer IPA

Under the cooperation between Fraunhofer IPA, Yaskawa Smart Robotics Center in Japan and Yaskawa Motoman Robotics, a ROS-I driver to support multi-groups control for the Motoman Robots was developed.

The first industrial dual-arm manipulator to run the driver was the Motoman SDA10F with an FS100 controller. The driver provided the capability for generating synchronous and asynchronous movements from the ROS side that could be send to the FS100 controller and then executed by the real robot groups (left arm, right arm and torso). Also, support packages were setup including driver configuration files, URDF and MoveIT! configuration files.

The driver was also demonstrated during ROSCON 2014, using a Motoman BMDA3 robot. [Remarkably, the driver worked with the hardware despite the SwRI software team never having access to the hardware prior to the event.] The demo was organized by Yaskawa Motoman and SwRI.

Erik Nieves (Yaskawa Motoman USA) Grooves with the BMDA3 at ROSCon 2014 in Chicago

Paul Hvass (SWRI/ ROS-Industrial Consortium PM) "running" with the BMDA3

Some tutorials are recommended for getting a better overview of the driver usage and system configuration:

• Installation procedure

• Creating a dual-arm system

• Dual-arm system example

Some additional information:

• The initial release is a source-only release for Hydro. The Indigo Binary Release is going to follow in Q1 2015.

• Please direct your public questions to the ROS-I developers list (swri-ros-pkg-dev@googlegroups.com)

Demonstrating the Integration of ROS with Siemens’ Process Simulate

Siemens PLM Software is a leading global provider of product lifecycle management (PLM) software. Those PLM solutions, can help make smarter decisions that lead to better products.

As always, we at Siemens PLM Software are looking for new areas that will allow us to understand the future of robotics in the industrial sector. After we came across The Robot Operating System (ROS) and ROS-Industrial, I was sent to take a closer look. In June, I participated in the “ROS Industrial Basic Developers Training Class” held at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) to understand more about the ROS ecosystem and tools. Since then, I have been experimenting with ROS libraries and tools and thinking about a connection between ROS Industrial and our own Process Simulate software.

From what I learned, ROS Industrial has interesting potential in the area of industrial robotics by providing the following:

• Standardization for robotic languages.
• Real time path planning and collision avoidance.
• A huge library of open source components.

For the above reasons, we believe that ROS-I has the potential to play a significant role in the industry and we should be a part of it.

After a few experiments, I compiled the demo (refer to video above) which shows how Process Simulate can provide a full simulation environment for a ROS controlled robot (R2-D2 believe it or not). In the demo, you’ll see that R2-D2 has three proximity sensors which are mounted on the right, front and left (their signal values can be seen in real time on the top left of the screen). R2-D2’s objective is to leave the maze using the simple algorithm of “always try to turn to the right”. But to make its life a little more interesting, we added red barriers which are removed manually at the start of the simulation to create a more dynamic environment.

As you can see from the rqt_graph above, the sensory information received from Process Simulate is processed on the ROS side and information about the robot’s new location is sent back to Process Simulate (the objects in red are Process Simulate components).

Along the way, I overcame a couple of interesting challenges such as:

• Having to write a robotic program using third party tools.
• Connecting between Windows-based Process Simulate and Linux-based ROS.

After discovering some real added value of linking ROS Industrial with Process Simulate, I’m going to explore further capabilities, like Vision, and working with more complicated environments using advanced Process Simulate and ROS Industrial software packages (PLC and welding in Process Simulate and OpenCV and MoveIt in ROS-I).

If you are looking to share interesting view points, use cases and environment challenges which are related to ROS-I, contact me at: moshe.schwimmer (at sign) siemens.com

Additional references:

http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/en_us/products/tecnomatix

https://www.facebook.com/Tecnomatix.NXforManufacturing

Yaskawa Motoman Offers Robots to Amazon Picking Challenge Teams

Yaskawa Motoman Robotics is pleased to announce sponsorship of the Amazon Picking Challenge to be held in conjunction with ICRA 2015. This open competition will further the development of robot skills required for e-commerce and other material handling. Yaskawa Motoman is offering consignment robots to select teams entering the challenge. Selected teams will receive their choice of robot model in January, 2015 and may keep them through June, subject to model availability. To apply for a Motoman consignment robot, please submit the following items via this form by midnight PST December 17, 2014 January 16, 2015 (extended deadline).

• Video of a simulated robot executing a picking task
• Link to your team/organization website
• Completed application describing your Motoman hardware utilization plan

Yaskawa Motoman will provide robots, software (including our MotoROS driver), and onsite technical support both at the team’s location and the event.

To support your development efforts, the ROS-Industrial Consortium will be updating its pick and place tutorial to include the Motoman MH5 II model. The tutorial will also be updated to ROS Indigo. Additional resource links:

• ROS-Industrial open source software for various Motoman robots
• ROS-I Tutorials for Motoman Robots
• All Motoman Robots

Software Engineer/PhD opening at Fraunhofer IPA

From Florian Weißhardt via ros-users@

Position: Software Engineer, possibility to obtain PhD degree

Location: Fraunhofer IPA, Stuttgart, Germany

Experience: Strong skills in software design and C/C++ development and rich experience in ROS development

Finding solutions to organizational and technological challenges, particularly within the production environment of industrial enterprises. That, in a nutshell, is the key focus of the research and development work carried out at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA. With 14 individual departments engaged in the fields of Corporate Organization, Automation and Surface Engineering, our R&D projects aim to enhance production processes and make products more cost-effective and environmentally friendly by identifying and exploiting the potential for automation and streamlining at clients' companies.

The Fraunhofer IPA department for robot and assistive systems develops service robots for various application fields (e.g. domestic, inspection, logistics, production assistance, manufacturing, etc.) with the goal of reliable, robust and safe service of these robots in everyday environments. These applications require complex software systems including navigation, planning, perception and manipulation for dynamic and changing environments and intuitive human-robot interaction.

The position covers the development of concepts and tools to reduce integration effort and simplify application development for these complex robotic systems in the frame of public funded national and EU projects. The transfer of the results to industry by organizing workshops, publishing articles relevant magazines and exhibiting demonstrators at fairs and conferences is part of the job description as well.

You have completed your master or diploma degree with excellent results and are interested in interdisciplinary research with high-tech robots like Care-O-bot or KUKA iiwa. You could already gather experience in scientific working and optimally already presented your first results at an international conference. You are confident in software architectures and software engineering and have practical experiences with the development of robot applications in ROS.

We offer you a highly interesting and diverse work environment with both contact to top robotics researchers and industry. In addition to obtaining a phd degree, the position encompasses early transfer of project and staff responsibility. For the implementation and validation of your ideas, we offer exceptionally equipped laboritories and test environments.

Qualifications/Requirements:

• Rich experience in ROS development
• A Master/Diploma degree from a top university in computer science, robotics or software engineering
• Strong skills software design and C/C++ development
• Proficient oral and written English skills

Advantageous are:

• Experience with model-driven engineering approaches
• Oral and written German skills

Please include the following documents in your application:

• Cover letter that expresses your motivation and (research) goals
• CV
• Transcripts of all obtained degrees (including scholar education)
• References and certificates relevant to the position

Please send your application to martina.goetzner@ipa.fraunhofer.de referring to position IPA-2014-109.

Alten Mechatronics Applies Robotic Technology in FEI Transmission Electron Microscopes (TEM)

Submitted by Simon Jansen, Alten Mechatronics

FEI designs, produces and supports a wide variety of high performance microscope systems, which can visualize details up to the picometer scale.

In their small dual beam (SDB) systems, a moving stage platform is present. This stage platform needs to be positioned in eight degrees of freedom (DOF).  Next to the stage, the microscope contains a lot more components such as an electron and ion column, multiple detectors and a gas injection system.  These SDB systems are not only used as pure microscopes, but also as nano workshop systems. It is possible to use these systems to add or remove material of a sample, while the sample is being inspected.

Because these microscopy system have such a wide variety of applications, the microscopy chamber gets rather full with components and parts. Therefore positioning and moving the eight DOF stage becomes more and more challenging.

In current systems, an in-house developed solution is used to plan the motion trajectories for the stage. The most important requirement is that the stage moves collision free between two configurations. Using the current solution, each movement between stage configurations is programmed by hand.  In some cases, this planning problem is just too complex and the current in-house developed solution is not able to find a solution. In other cases, the found solution takes too much time because axes can only be moved sequentially. This consumes a lot of time when moving eight axes and is therefore not feasible.

FEI is investigating alternative solutions to perform motion planning for their stage. For these alternatives it is important that the stage moves collision free within a certain time. This time should be minimized to obtain the highest possible throughput. A benefit of using motion planning is the possibility to move axes in parallel instead of sequentially. 

Alten Mechatronics performed a proof of principle study in which a simulation model of the microscope was developed. By using the motion planner MoveIt! collision free paths were generated for different stage configurations. Three cases were selected and compared to the current solution. One case was meant to benchmark the new motion planner, the two other cases to show the capabilities of the motion planner in extreme situations.

Alten showed that by using MoveIt! it became possible to calculate stage trajectories up to five times faster than trajectories found by using the in-house developed solution. For the other cases, it became possible to find trajectories that were not possible when using the in-house developed solution.

By using MoveIt! it is possible to realize complex stage movements which are guaranteed to be collision free and are resulting in a much higher throughput.

For the next phase, the results of the first ROS-Industrial Focused Technical Project (http://rosindustrial.org/ftp-status/) will be used to improve the performance of planner. In the first phase, MoveIt sometimes generated sub-optimal paths, which had to be rejected. With the optimization of the FTP, we will be able to guarantee near optimal solutions and be able to predict a lower reliable cycle time.

Mark Geelen & Simon Jansen Contact: rosindustrial(at-sign)alten.nl

3rd ROS-Industrial Training at Fraunhofer IPA: ROS for Industrial Applications

ROS-Industrial Technology Seminar: "ROS for Industrial Applications"

Friday, October 24, 2014

More information: Stuttgarter Produktionsakademie

Description

The open source “Robot Operating System” ROS offers highly developed robotics software components which can be used in flexible industrial applications. In this praxis-oriented tutorial users will get in touch with the basic functionalities of the ROS framework and the ROS-Industrial initiative. Participants will get an impression about the power of the system and learn how to use it in their own application.

Especially in dynamic environments with a variety of different work pieces there is a demand for highly flexible automation solutions supported by sensors and intelligent software components. A cost efficient, reusable and powerful solution is the open source framework ROS. It offers a huge amount of intelligent algorithms, methods and integrated libraries. An advantage is that software as well as hardware components can easily be exchanged due to a network based communication layer and standardized interfaces. This allows time saving and cost effective software development, which lowers the overall development costs.

In robotics research ROS is a well-established standard. The next step is to bring this power to industrial applications. For this purpose the ROS-Industrial initiative was founded. This tutorial will get the participants in touch with the theoretical basics of ROS and teach how to practically use it for their own industrial application.

Workshop Topics:

* ROS – Introduction and Basics
* 3D-Perception using ROS
* Localization and Navigation using ROS
* Motion Planning with MoveIt!
* Application Development using ROS
* Introduction to ROS-Industrial Initiative

In small groups the attendees will have the chance to gain hands-on experience within those topics under the guidance of experts of the respective field. The seminar is suitable for attendees both with or without experience in using ROS and will be held in bilingual language (German, English).

Also please feel free to forward this E-Mail to your colleagues, project collaborators or those who may be interested in this seminar.

If you have questions please don’t hesitate to contact us!

Hope to see some of you in October (or for the 4th seminar on Thursday, March 5th, 2015)!

Contact Person:

Dipl.-Ing. Florian Weißhardt Project Manager ROS Industrial Fraunhofer-Institute For Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA, Stuttgart Florian.Weisshardt@ipa.fraunhofer.de

Industrial Calibration Library Update and Presentation

By Dr. Chris Lewis, SwRI:

Robotics and automation systems are increasingly reliant on both 2D and 3D imaging systems  to provide both perception and pose estimation. Calibration of these camera/robot systems is necessary, time consuming, and often a poorly executed process for registering image data to the physical world. SwRI is continuing to develop the industrial calibration library to provide tools for state-of-the-art calibration with the goal to provide reliably accurate results for non-expert users. Using the library, system designers may script a series of observations that ensure sufficient diversity of data to guarantee system accuracy. Often interfaces to motion devices such as robots may be included to fully automate the calibration procedure.

As a vision systems developer one may ask the following questions with regards to both intrinsic and extrinsic camera calibration.

1. How many images of the calibration target are needed?
2. At what ranges?
3. At what angles?
4. How many near the center of the field of view vs at the edges?
5. What accuracy is achievable?
6. What accuracy was achieved?

With our framework, a user may rapidly explore these questions.

Our framework is built using Google's Ceres Solver which is a state of the art non-linear optimization tool specifically designed to solve Bundle Adjustment problems efficiently. Our framework consists of five main parts.

1. The main script processing code which
   • Collects observations
   • Runs the optimization
   • Installs the results
2. A library of Ceres compatible cost functions.
3. The camera observer interface which ties your cameras to the system and automatically triggers the camera and locates common calibration targets within specified regions of interest.
4. The scene trigger interface which provides interfaces to motion hardware such as robots. It may also serve to communicate with users to specify how to configure each scene.
5. Transform interfaces which provide the means by which kinematic values may be fed into and out of the calibration system. Updates to these extrinsic kinematic parameters is immediate and persistent.

Using this framework, we have demonstrated three distinctly different calibrations:

• Extrinsic calibration of a camera mounted on the tool of a robot
• Extrinsic calibration of a network of cameras
• Extrinsic calibration of a static camera to a robot

In addition, the ROS-I team is currently developing an intrinsic calibration script whereby a robot moves the calibration target to create a repeatable set of calibration images. In the near future, we will be developing kinematic calibration procedures for robots using cameras to better estimate robotic joint parameters.

Additional links:

• Wiki documentation: industrial_extrinsic_cal
• Tutorials
• One-shot calibration video
• Presentation slides

Robotiq's New Force-Torque Sensor Support Added

Robotiq has recently announced the release of its new Force-Torque sensor. Please note that they've updated their ROS-I repository to include ROS support for it!

Community Meeting Video Posted

Thanks to everyone who participated in the ROS-Industrial Community meeting that was held in conjunction with ROSCon on Saturday, September 13! A special thanks to our presenters:

• Paul Hvass (SwRI): Welcome and Update on RIC-Americas
• Alexander Bubeck (Fraunhofer IPA): Update from RIC-EU 
• Clay Flannigan (SwRI): ROS-I Roadmapping update
• Preben Hjornet (Blue Workforce): Why ROS-I Community needs to adopt the Kinect 2 
• Risto Kojcev (Italian Institute of Technology): Introducing the Cartesian path planner plug-in for MoveIt!
• Ryan Gneiting (Deere and Co.): John Deere ROS-I demo cell

Participants included: ABB USA, Blue Workforce, CAT, Clearpath, Fraunhofer IPA, HDT Robotics, Innervycs, Intelligrated, Italian Institute of Technology, John Deere, Leica Biosystems, Max Planch Institute, MTC, Northwestern U., NRL, Omnico AGV, Open Source Robotics Kyokai, OSRF, Reiter Affiliated Companies, Rethink Robotics, Shadow Robot, SICK, Siemens, Spirit AeroSystems, SwRI, TU Delft, UIC, UT Austin, and Wiki Technium! Your insight and energy is key to our growing community.

ROS-I Community meetings occur 3 times per year and are open to the public.

Microsoft Kinect v2 Driver Released

Reposted from ROS.org/news

From Thiemo and Alexis via ros-users@

Dear ROS Community,

I am Thiemo from the Institute for Artificial Intelligence at the University of Bremen. I am currently a PhD Student under the supervision of Prof. Michael Beetz. I'm writing this together with Alexis Maldonado, another PhD Student at our lab, who has helped mainly with the hardware aspects.

To continue reading: http://www.ros.org/news/2014/09/microsoft-kinect-v2-driver-released.html

Note that the Kinect v2 was the topic of a presentation by Preben Hjornet from Blue Workforce during the recent ROS-Industrial Community Meeting, held at ROSCon on Sept. 13th. To listen to that presentation, go to time stamp 23:14 here: http://youtu.be/7gKnzVTEbVM

Cartesian Path Planner Plug-In for MoveIt!

Dear ROS-I Community,

My name is Risto Kojcev, a joint PhD student between the BioRobotics Institute at Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna and MicroBio Robotics Institute at the Italian Institute of Technology, in Pisa Italy.

This year I was participating in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) directed by the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) and ROS-Industrial (ROS-I) Consortium. The title of my project was Cartesian Path Planner Plug-In for MoveIt.

In this blog post I would like to share the vision behind the GSoC project and its usefulness in the real robotic applications.

Technical Details of the Plug-In

The project aim was to develop a user friendly Cartesian Path Planner Plug-In for MoveIt!. In the current version of the project, the user can simultaneously interact with a Qt Widget and the RViz environment to define and set Cartesian Way-Points, which can then be passed to the Cartesian Planner of the MoveIt package and executed both on a simulated and real robot. [Cartesian waypoints can also be loaded externally from a yaml file.]

For the User Interaction in the RViz environment the Interactive Marker package was used. The plug-in offers two types of Interactive Markers. The first one is called Interaction Marker and is used to add the second type of Interactive Marker, the actual Cartesian Way-Points. The Cartesian Way-Points can be moved around freely in the RViz environment, and a menu that offers additional components for removing the Way from the Cartesian Plan and more detailed 6DOF control is available for each Way-Point. The color of the Way-Points lets the user know if a certain Way-Point is within the range of the Inverse Kinematics (IK) solution for the loaded robot model. In the case when the point is within the range of the IK Solution the color of the way-point is blue and yellow otherwise.

The user can also interact with the Cartesian Planner through a Qt Widget. In this widget all the Way-Points are displayed, offering additional details about each Way-Point Pose, which can be edited and adjusted by the user. Furthermore, the user can perform the same operations as in the RViz environment: adding a new Way-Point or removing it. The Way-Points can be saved to a file and the Plug-in also offers the user to load a previously saved way-points file.

The Cartesian Planner part of this Plug-in offers the user a means to adjust the parameters of the Cartesian Planner and execute a Cartesian Path set from the previously added Way-Points.

More detailed tutorials and description of the Plug-in can be found on the moveit_cartesian_plan_plugin wiki page. For the source code of the project, reporting bugs and further development suggestions, please visit the github repository.

Applications and Future Development

The design goals behind the Cartesian Plug-in was to create a simple and user friendly environment, which targets larger groups of users, from ROS beginners to more ROS experienced users. It is envisioned to find its applications in a lot of industrial applications, for example welding, painting or performing more complex actions. This Plug-in is a good starting point for future development of other applications, not just in the industrial robotics area, where Cartesian path planning is useful. For example to even further automate the creation of Way-Points an external perception system can be used which would generate Cartesian Way-Points and then the user can review the Cartesian Path, correct it and execute it, or even save it if necessary.

I would like to conclude this blog post by sharing my gratitude towards all the ROS-I community members and my mentor Shaun Edwards, who shared their suggestions during the project development. I am very happy that I had the chance to participate in this awesome program and this was a great experience for me and most of all I had lot of fun working on this project. I hope that this project would find its place in many applications and it would be useful for lot of users.

ROS-I Updates: FTP Status and ROSCon

Checkout the following ROS-Industrial news items:

• We’ve added a new page to the ROS-Industrial website called FTP Status. It provides descriptions, media, and links related to ROS-Industrial Consortium Focused Technical Projects. Browse the list of “brewing” projects to see if any topics align with needs at your organization.
• The agenda for ROSCon is posted. Organized by OSRF, ROSCon is the annual meeting of all ROS software developers, not just those contributing to ROS-Industrial. It takes place September 12-13 in Chicago. Take this opportunity to register. The following sessions will be of particular interest to the ROS-Industrial community:
  • ROS 2.0: Developer preview: Dirk Thomas, William Woodall, Esteve Fernandez
  • Next-generation ROS: Building on DDS: Dirk Thomas, William Woodall, Esteve Fernandez
  • ROS-Industrial calibration: Chris Lewis
• We are planning to host a ROS-Industrial Community meeting at ROSCon on Sept. 13, 3:30 to 5 PM CST. We will present an update on the ROS-Industrial Consortia (Americas/EU) and the results of the ROS-Industrial roadmapping effort.
• ROSCon is happening the Friday and Saturday between IMTS and IROS, so consider making your trip a double (or triple) header.

Fraunhofer IPA Press Release: Kick-off of European ROS-Industrial consortium at Fraunhofer IPA

Under the leadership of Fraunhofer IPA, the kick-off of the European ROS-Industrial consortium as well as the second international ROS-Industrial conference took place in Stuttgart, Germany, at the end of June 2014. Experts from industry and research presented ROS-Industrial key developments, applications, components and trends.

Continue reading the press release on the Fraunhofer IPA website.

ROS-Industrial Consortium-Europe Kickoff Meeting Attendees

More than 70 people attended the public ROS-I conference that preceded the Consortium members' meeting.

ROS-Industrial Update

The ROS-Industrial team has been very busy developing new functionality that I am very excited to share with you.

ROS-Industrial Hydro Release!

We officially released a few ROS-Industrial packages about six months back, and released the final package just a couple of months ago. A brief description of the new features/updates can be found here. It's now possible to install from debians: sudo apt-get install ros-hydro-industrial-desktop. More detailed instructions can be found here. We typically lag ROS releases to ensure stability, but the switch to catkin really delayed us. It feels like we transitioned to catkin twice, first to get source builds working and then a second time to get debian builds working. Having put the port to catkin behind us, I'm confident we will do better next release.

Robot Vendor Package Support

Early ROS-Industrial development was focused on developing robot specific drivers. Some of these packages were developed from scratch, such as the Fanuc package, developed by TUDelft and others were acquired as orphaned projects. In order to ensure the continued development and maintenance of these drivers, we are reaching out to the community for help. Recently, Fraunhofer IPA has taken ownership of the Universal Robot. We appreciate the help of both TUDelft and IPA. We are actively looking for developers/maintainers for our other driver packages (if you are interested send an email to this developers list).

Google Summer of Code

We are participating in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) under the OSRF umbrella. GSoC pays students to perform open source development. ROS-Industrial has two projects: a cartesian planner GUI plugin for MoveIt (repo) and an intuitive 3D interface for industrial painting (repo). We are very excited to be part of this awesome program and are looking forward to what our students come up with. Stay tuned for posts from our students.

Special Thanks to the Community

It's no secret that ROS-Industrial is a community effort. I'm very proud to say that ROS-Industrial receives contributions from some of the best academic, research, and commercial organizations from around the world. Our current stats have us at 24 contributors in the last year and that's not even counting those who participate in code reviews and submit issues. I can honestly say I've worked with some of the greatest developers in my career through the ROS-Industrial program.

ROS-I Training Class Curriculum Free for Public Use

The ROS-Industrial Basic Developers' Training Class curriculum was developed under funding from the ROS-Industrial Consortium to streamline the introduction of Ubuntu Linux, ROS, ROS-I, PCL, and MoveIt! to industrial automation C++ code developers who are new to ROS. The curriculum culminates with a vision-enabled pick-and-place project. The class was first developed for the ROS-Groovy version and held in June 2013. In May 2014, we updated and extended the course for ROS-Hydro.

With the approval of the ROS-I Consortium Advisory Committee, the curriculum has been made public (Creative Commons license) and linked to the ROS-I wiki. The class materials consist of presentation slides, step-by-step instructions, and source code for exercises. Each of the exercises is intended to take approximately 30 minutes to complete. The source code is now available on the ROS-I GitHub site. Links:

• Browse the course materials
• Setup instructions