ROS-Industrial Asia Pacific Workshop 2020

The Annual ROS-Industrial Asia Pacific Workshop took place on the 29th October 2020, this year in a one day digital webinar format. The workshop was opened by our Guest-of-Honor, Prof. Quek Tong Boon, Chief Executive of the Singapore National Robotics Programme. After the opening, Erik Unemyr, Consortium Manager for ROS-Industrial Asia Pacific, shared updates on the topic of “Industry Ready ROS 2 – Easy to Adopt Modules with Quality”, which comprised of the current technology focus the team has been developing in-house, including:

1. easy_perception_deployment – a ROS2 Package that aims to accelerate the training and deployment of Computer Vision models for industry use (which is now in Beta release, and you can find it here)

2. easy_manipulation_deployment – a ROS2 Package that has a user-friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI) to create a robotic workcell, and supports a variety of commonly used industrial end-effectors using a flexible grasp implementation approach. This will package will be released soon, to be made available on the ROS-Industrial GitHub.

Next, we had the opportunity to invite Roger Barga, General Manager at AWS Robotics, to present on “The Role of the Cloud in Future of Robotics”. During his presentation, he addressed the importance and necessity of applications in cloud computing such as using it for development of robotic applications in simulation, testing and deployment. AWS also currently supports ROS, ROS2 & Gazebo within their services.

Matt Robinson, Programme Manager for our ROS-Industrial counterpart in Americas at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), presented on “Enabling Production Performance in ROS-Based Systems” where he brought up the value of ROS2 for various industrial use cases and also showcased some of the developments happening at SwRI.

Sharing more details about the activities at the Advanced Remanufacturing and Technology Centre, Bai Fengjun, Technical Lead from the Advanced Robotics Applications team at ARTC, presented development on the Next Generation Hyper-Personalization Line and how ROS has played a part in the development of such applications for the Fast Moving Consumer Goods sector.

Michael Sayre, CEO & Co-Founder of Cognicept Systems, one of our Consortium Members in the Asia Pacific Region, then presented on the importance of error handling and remote management for robotic fleets, and their latest development of the ROS2 Listener agent that was developed together with the ROS-Industrial Team at ARTC. You can find the repository here.

Shortly after, Albertus Hendrawan Adiawahono, Head of the Mobility Group at the ASTAR Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) presented on their current efforts with the local healthcare ecosystem to develop modules that would aid robots to be more resilient in the hospital ward setting, where the environment rapidly changes. They currently have completed Proof of Concepts in which the robots are able to adapt to lifts, curtains and even simulating a blue code emergency drill.

After the lunch break, we invited Jack Sheng Kee, Lab Director of the Delta Research Centre, a ROS-Industrial Consortium Member, to share on “Reconfigurable and Flexible Automation in Manufacturing” where he presented some of the existing solutions Delta has developed, and how they are all ROS supported.

We also had the team from Open Robotics, Marco Gutierrez and Grey, to present on roadmap updates with new features and future plans for Ignition Gazebo, ROS2 and also the Robotics Middleware Framework (RMF). The development of RMF has become a key effort in driving the integration and deployment of wide-scale smart robotics systems, which includes the communication between robots, building infrastructure and other edge devices.

Christoph Hellmann Santos, Consortium Manager for ROS-Industrial Europe at Fraunhofer IPA presented on the latest updates and success stories of both the ROSIN and ROS-Industrial Projects, such as the toolbox for automated delivery for the DHL Streetscooter and the real-time mapping project with Bosch Rexroth.

Prof Trygve Thomessen, Managing Director of PPM Robotics AS also presented ROSIN updates with the ROSWELD project, an application and success story of ROS being deployed in heavy industrial applications such as robotic welding. Last but not least, we had Andrei Kholodnyi, Principal Technologist at Wind River to present on “A Mixed-Critical ROS2 Implementation on VxWorks RTOS, WRLinux & Hypervisor” where he highlighted the use and importance of safety compliant and real-time solutions for ROS2 Applications.

A summarized table of all the speakers, including presentation slides and recording, is now available here!

To conclude this year’s ROS-Industrial Workshop Asia Pacific, Dr. Zhang Jing Bing, Technical Division Director for Smart Robotics and Automation (SRA) at ARTC gave his closing remarks.

The ROS-Industrial Consortium Asia Pacific @ ARTC continue with a multi-prong approach in bridging the gaps between the industry and the community in adoption of ROS and robotics, by working closely with our industry partners and to develop modules that can cater for industrial needs, providing training opportunities for aspiring roboticists as well as companies that are embarking on leveraging ROS to scale their robotics adoption.

On behalf of the ROS-Industrial Team at ARTC, we hope that you enjoyed the webinar as much as we did, and we look forward to meeting each other in 2021 for future ROS-Industrial activities!