The ROS-Industrial Consortium Americas will host its annual member meeting online across a series of topical sessions April 13-15, 2021. While we hoped to be able to host an in person event this year, the conditions just are not at the place to allow such an event. That said, we look forward to enabling the sharing of the latest developments around open-soruce for industry in as compelling of a virtual format as we can organize. Please keep an eye out for the agenda listing the sessions and workshops, with special member-only sessions to help update the technical direction of the ROS-I project.
The annual Members' Meeting is a chance to understand the latest developments relative to ROS-Industrial, both within the Americas and around the world. This is a valuable opportunity to see in person, how the systems perform and what are the key elements for a specific use case/implementation. This is a chance to collaborate and seek synergies with other members around the leverage of open-source for industrial use.
Demonstration of the A5 Platform
As with all member meetings we will work to drive engagement to refine the strategy for how ROS-I capability is shaped, in particular with regards to the latest developments around ROS2, and how the transition to ROS2 is progressing in the industrial community.
This event is always a great opportunity to engage with others interested end-users, OEMs, solution providers and researchers on open source, interoperable, agile software capabilities. The collaborations that emerge through these interactions have led to significant accomplishments, of which you will learn about at this gathering. We look forward to networking online!
When: April 13-15, 2021
Location: Online - Log in details will be provided to registrants starting 1 week in advance of the event.
Host: Matt Robinson, RIC-Americas Program Manager
Registration: Registration is Closed, See you in 2022!
Agenda: - Subject to change
April 13
| Time | Topic | Speaker | Slides | Video |
| 845 | Meeting Room Opens | |||
| 900 | Kick Off/Welcome | Matt Robinson, ROS-I Consortium Americas Program Manager, SwRI | ||
| 910 | ROS-Industrial Americas - A Year in Review | Matt Robinson, ROS-I Consortium Americas Program Manager, SwRI | Slides | Video |
| 930 | ROS-Industrial Asia Pacific Updates and Developmental Updates to Easy Perception and Manipulation Deployment | Darryl Lee, Consortium Manager and Glenn Tan Development Engineer, ROS-I Consortium AP | Slides | Video |
| 950 | ROS-Industrial – New Horizons for European Open Source Robotics | Christoph Hellmann Santos, ROS-Industrial Consortium EU Program Manager, Fraunhofer IPA | Slides | Video |
| 1010 | Break | |||
| 1020 | Automated Code Generation of Simulink Models as ros_control Controllers | Murat Belge, MathWorks , G.A. vd. Hoorn, CoR, Delft University of Technology | Slides | Video |
| 1040 | The NIST Robotics Program With a Focus on Agility in Robotics | Dr. Craig Schlenoff, Program Manager, NIST’s Measurement Science for Manufacturing Robotics Program | Slides | Video |
| 1100 | ROS Utilization at the Intelligent Sustainable Technologies Division of the Georgia Tech Research Institute | Stephen Balakirsky, Chief, Robotic Systems and Technology Branch, Georgia Tech Research Institute | Slides | Video |
| 1120 | Overview of the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing Institute (ARM) what they do, the types of ROS modules they use and their successes achieved by using ROS | Arnie Kravitz, CTO, ARM Institute | Slides | Video |
| 1140 | Perception-Based Collaborative Robotic Sanding with ROS1 and ROS2 | Joseph Marshall and Bharath Roa, Spirit AeroSystems | Slides | Video |
| 1200 | Break | |||
| 1300 | Open Robotics Update: Kinetic, Galactic, and Transition Recommendations | Katherine "Kat" Scott, Developer Advocate, Open Robotics | Slides | Video |
| 1320 | A ROS2 Driver for Universal Robots | Andy Zelenak, Senior Controls Engineer, PickNik Robotics | Slides | Video |
| 1340 | Towards Autonomous Industries: ROS++ | Atul Hatalkar, Principal Engineer – Robotics, Intel | Slides | Video |
| 1400 | Using ROS2 with the Mixed Reality Toolkit to develop AR and VR applications for Robotics | Lou Amadio, Principal Software Development Lead Azure Edge Robotics Team, Microsoft | Slides | Video |
| 1420 | Break | |||
| 1430 | Robotics Security Kickstart | Sid Faber, Canonical | Slides | Video |
| 1450 | Call to Action for Robotics Education | Jack Reilly, AWS | Slides | Video |
| 1510 | Multi-Machine Multi-Robot Interoperability | Dr. Michael Jaentsch, Siemens | Slides | Video |
| 1530 | PHARAOH: An English-language procedure-based application framework for full or semi-autonomous robot operations | Dr. Robert Burridge, TracLabs | Slides | Video |
| 1550 | Closing Remarks | Matt Robinson, ROS-Industrial Consortium Americas Program Manager, SwRI | ||
April 14
Member Only Day - Driving conversations around moving forward with industry use of ROS and ROS2 and how the ROS-I Open-Source project can continue to address member needs.
| Time | Topic | Speaker |
| 845 | Meeting Room Opens/Welcome | Matt Robinson, ROS-Industrial Consortium Americas Program Manager, SwRI |
| 900 | ROS-Industrial Consortium Americas Consortium Member Update and 2021 Preview | Matt Robinson, ROS-Industrial Consortium Americas Program Manager, SwRI |
| 930 | Panel: Getting Into ROS Application Development | Shaun Edwards, CTO, PlusOne Robotics, Akash Jinandra, Lead Robotics Systems Engineer, Bastian Solutions, Justin Kinney, Technical Manager Robotics and Mechatronics, NOV |
| 1000 | Workshop – Feedback on Areas of Need – Prioritization and Gaps | Moderators: Levi Armstrong, SwRI, Matt Robinson, SwRI, and Josh Langsfeld, SwRI |
| 1200 | Break | |
| 1300 | Member Share: Needs within the Steel Foundry Industry | David Poweleit, Manager, Steel Founders’ Society of America |
| 1330 | ROS Workbench | Levi Armstrong, ROS-I Tech Lead, SwRI |
| 1350 | Member Keynote: Boeing's Open Source Journey Towards Robust Factory Mobility for Mobile Manipulation | Martin Szarski & William Ko, Boeing |
| 1420 | Break | |
| 1430 | Focused Technical Project Workshop | Moderated by Matt Robinson, ROS-Industrial Consortium Americas Program Manager, SwRI |
| 1600 | Out Brief and Closing | Matt Robinson, ROS-Industrial Consortium Americas Program Manager, SwRI |
April 15
Demo Day 0900 - 1100
A series of demonstrations from various labs/work spaces across the ROS-I member community. Featuring Demonstrations by:
- Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Video) - Honglu He, Burak Aksoy (John Wason and John Wen will be there to provide additional support) - Robot Raconteur (RR) is an object-oriented robot communication library focusing on robot plug-and-play capability and interoperability. In the testbed we developed at RPI, robots from three different vendors (Sawyer, UR5 and ABB1200) perform pick and place task on a moving conveyor belt. Each robot has its own RR driver using the same RR interface standard (including ROS-enabled robots such as Sawyer). This means that the same client is able to control different robots with exactly the same code. The testbed also includes Cognex and Kinect Azure sensors to provide visual guidance integrated by RR. In this demo, we will show the plug-n-play operation an RR-enabled robot and its introduction into the testbed with only two steps: calibration and task assignment. We will also show our work on the smart teach pendant which provides same programming.
- ARIS Technology (Video) - Mingu Kang - MR-Guided Path Planning with Robotically Generated Digital Twin: We plan to make the robot programming and digital twin generation effective & user friendly using Mixed Reality (MR), and apply the technology to quality inspection. We are using HoloLens 2 with ROS to generate a scan tool path, robot trajectory, and simulate the motion planning. Once the planned motion is accepted, the robotic 3D scanning system collects data and performs inspection.
- University of Southern California (Video) - Omey Manyar - Composite Ply Layup has historically been a manual process. University of Southern California (USC) has developed via the ARM Institute, a hybrid robotic process that manages the material and enables a human worker to also work in conjunction with the automation. This demonstration will showcase the recent success in hybrid robotic processing of the ply layup process.
- University of Texas at Austin – Nuclear Robotics Group (Video) - Mitch Pryor, Can Pehlivanturk, and Mark Jennings - Recent activities in UT Austin's new Anna Hiss (Robot) Gym. Texas Robotics has moved into its new facility supporting 15 Robotics faculty members from 4 departments. I will give a quick walkthrough of the new facility bookended by demonstrations using augmented reality to monitor teams of mobile robots and using the latest in co-robotics for the precision assembly of heavy objects.
- Southwest Research Institute (Video) - Levi Armstrong - The demo involves a 6 degree of freedom (DOF) robot suspended underneath a 2 DOF gantry. The demo application is to avoid dynamic obstacles in the environment (for example a human walking in the workcell). Success for this project was defined as the ability to update a robot trajectory at a frequency of at least 50 Hz with a target of 200Hz. The demo includes a system that is planning to a fixed toolpath while avoiding a single dynamic obstacle which is represented by a cylinder for simplicity but the system support any number of obstacles. The demo application was able to dynamically generate trajectories between 600-1000hz and this will be demonstrated live.
- PushCorp - Eddie Erlbacher, Isaiah Flora, and Max Falcone - PushCorp will be giving you a sneak peak to their brand new paper changer (SDC125) that will be releasing later this year. The demo will be a sanding application using an active force compliance device (AFD310) and random orbital sander (RPS100). It will go through several paper changes to show how the device can easily remove the paper from the backup pad and apply a new one for longer continuous use.
- Microsoft (Video) - Lou Amadio - The demonstration will be using ROS and talking to a real device. Lou will walk through initializing a Hololens applications for those who are unfamiliar with that development flow and using the Mixed Reality Toolkit.
- Southwest Research Institute (Video) - Doug Smith -Industrial manipulator built with open source software. Open source software like ROS and HAL from LinuxCNC has evolved to the point where it is possible to create an entire industrial robot without a traditional robot controller. Applications that required expensive hardware and proprietary software can now be done with a low cost-high capability robot powered by a standard PC.
We look forward to collaborating with the membership and fostering a discussion on what is on the near horizon with regards to open-source advanced robotics development.
If you have questions regarding this event, or would like to inquire about participation, please contact Matt Robinson, matt.robinson@swri.org.
