Overseas Internship at ROS-Industrial Consortium Asia Pacific

Hello, my name is Willem de Graaf and I’m a former graduate intern at ROS-Industrial Asia Pacific, located in Singapore. I am majoring in Mechanical Engineering at Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands. During one of my Master’s courses I got acquainted with the ROS framework which got me interested to investigate further. When I got the opportunity to go abroad for my internship, I applied to ROS-Industrial Asia Pacific and got an intern position!

I would like to elaborate on how amazing this time was by guiding you through a typical day at the ROS Industrial Asia-Pacific office.

My day starts with traveling to the office. Owning a car in Singapore is quite expensive, so the majority of people travels with public transport. After 4 months in Singapore, I still don’t know if I can blame this behaviour on the expensive cars or the high humidity (as a Dutchy I thought it would be a good idea to have a 30 minute walk to the office on my first day. They considered me crazy). It is approximately a 10-minute walk to the MRT station where a shuttle bus will take me to the office. The whole journey will take around 25 minutes, which is quite fast for the average person working in the office. I arrive at the office between 8.15 and 8.30, where my day will start with a nice cup of coffee.

Before elaborating about the daily activities, it is helpful to give a little background information about the internship assignment. The assignment involved the design of an open-source library that will evaluate a gripper configuration against an object that has to be picked up by that gripper. The goal was to build a foundation of capabilities that will enhance the pick and place pipeline for manufacturing and warehouse environments. With this assignment, I got a lot of freedom to experiment with the existing ROS-Industrial software stack and the available hardware in the office.

Collaborative robot setup at the ROS-Industrial Consortium Asia Pacific office

The team within the organization is young, diverse and highly motivated to achieve the best in collaboration with companies. As said, I got my own project where I was given the opportunity to explore and express my own ideas. The team is working on a lot of projects at the same time and because we had a daily stand-up where we had to elaborate on our progress, we kept focus and challenged each other on a daily basis. From here onwards, I ran my own project and planned my daily activities. Most of the time I was developing software, but when it was time for testing the fun part started. I was able to use UR robots, KUKA robots, multiple grippers, conveyor belts and a lot of more fun stuff. You are free to explore the possibilities with different hardware and electronics.

Pick and place flexible gripper and conveyor belt setup - ROS-Industrial Asia Pacific Workshop 2019

A typical Asian thing is to get lunch together at a food court. Because the office location was not situated around food courts, we had to take a bus every day to lunch. For a European, this is the best part of the day. The variety of food is enormous and the amount is tremendous, especially taking the price into account. Comparing to the European prices a standard lunch is quite cheap. Due to this I have to confess that my cooking skills did not improve during my time in Singapore :p.

In the last week of my internship, our office hosted a yearly conference – the ROS-Industrial Asia Pacific Workshop 2019, where the capabilities of the developed library were showcased at a demonstration setup.

Willem de Graaf (Intern) and Arunava Nag (ROS-Industrial team) at the ROS-Industrial Asia Pacific Workshop 2019

I would like to conclude with saying that working at ROS-Industrial Asia Pacific could not have turned out better for me than it did. I learned a lot about the diverse Singaporean culture and people, I learned a lot about the Asian way of getting things done and above all, I learned a lot about ROS, which was my main goal.

If you’re seeking for an internship, please do not hesitate to contact them as they’re always open for enthusiastic and motivated students that will contribute to get open source robotics to companies!

Willem de Graaf