The inaugural ROSCon JP (Japan) in 2018

The first ROSCon JP opened in Tokyo on Friday, September 14, 2018 with much anticipation. It was an amazing sell-out crowd with 200 participants from the community. ROS-Industrial Consortium Asia Pacific was honored to participate and present our efforts in the industrial space to the conference attendees.

The one-day event was not dampened by the early morning rain and the room was quickly filled up with excited participants to hear the keynote speech from Brian Gerkey (CEO Open Robotics) and various prestigious speakers from industry, such as TORK, JAXA, Toyota Research Institute, Honda Research Institute, Hitachi and various universities.

Fig 1. Presentations by various speakers in the fully packed seminar room

Fig 2. Brian Gerkey (CEO, Open Robotics) presents on ‘Future ROS’

Brian’s speech envisioned how ROS2.0 will be designed to address the future needs of industry and commercial users. This is extremely important to us as an anchor for our work in the ROS-Industrial Consortium and will soon prove its value in our development work.

fig 3. Presentation from Open RoboticS on ROS 2.0

Our presentation looks through the lens of Asia Pacific as we started our journey for ROS-Industrial and what challenges were faced in developing the communities in the region and the need to gain their confidence and trust on using open source software.

Fig 4. Nicholas Yeo representing ROS-Industrial Consortium - Asia Pacific provided the insights on ‘ The Journey of building ROS-Industrial initiatives in Asia Pacific’

The most highly anticipated talk was nevertheless from Sony Corporation and their ‘kawaii’ robot dog – Aibo. The generation 2 Aibo is running on ROS with Amazon Web Services. Sony has made a significant stride to shift from internal proprietary solution to embrace open source. The crowd was amazed by the demonstration by Sony Corporation.

Fig 5. Sony Corporation presented on the ‘Use of ROS in Aibo and Sony's efforts

FIg 6. The adorable Aibo on the demonstration booth by Sony Corporation

The event has demonstrated the passion and interests from the Japanese communities. It is very exciting to feel from the community that ROS will continue to evolve and adopted in the coming years. I like to thank the executive committee team (Jeff Biggs, Egashira Hirokazu, Yukiko Nakagawa, Yutaka Kondo) for organizing this wonderful event. I will be looking forward to the development of ROS in this Community. The ROS-Industrial Consortium - Asia Pacific will continue to explore how we can strengthen and develop the ecosystem with our Japan partners.

FiG 7. Group photo with the ROSCON Japan committee and participants

For more information about the event and presentations please visit: http://roscon.jp/