It's a wrap for ROS-Industrial Asia Pacific Workshop 2021!

The Annual ROS-Industrial Asia Pacific Workshop took place on the 18th August 2021, as a one day digital webinar. The workshop was opened by our Guest-of-Honor, Professor Alfred Huan, Assistant Chief Executive of SERC from A*STAR, in which he has given an overview of the robotics and automation eco-system in Singapore, as well as the how the adoption of ROS has been proliferated throughout Asia Pacific.

After the opening, our keynote speaker, Mr Tan Jin Yang, Senior Manager of Changi Airport Group, shared the topic of “Robotics Middleware Framework (RMF) for Facilities Management”. With the increased number of robots being used to augment the workforce, there is also a growing importance in effectively managing and ensuring interoperability across disparate fleets of robots. He has then shared on how RMF is now being tested in trials at Changi Airport Terminal 3, to address the task scheduling, automation and infrastructure sharing of the various robot brands that the airport has.

Next, we had Mr Darryl Lee, the Consortium Manager of ROS-Industrial Asia Pacific from Advanced Remanufacturing and Technology Centre (ARTC), to present on “Accelerating Industry Adoption of ROS2 based Technology in Asia Pacific”. During his presentation, he addressed the latest developments ongoing within the ROS-Industrial Consortium Asia Pacific Team, such as the formally released easy_perception_deployment (EPD) & easy_manipulation_deployment (EMD) ROS2 Packages, ROS Quality Badges, as well as some of the on-going projects such as the trials at Changi Airport Group presented by Jin Yang earlier.

Mr Matt Robinson, Consortium Manager for our ROS-Industrial counterpart in Americas at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), presented on “Lowering the Barrier for Industry Personnel to Leverage Open Source” where he brought up the strategy for developments, and also sharing on some of the useful tools and capabilities that have been developed at SwRI, such as the offline toolpath planner, visual programming, ROS Workbench and many other open-sourced advancements.

Dr Dave Coleman, CEO & Roboticist of PickNik Robotics, presented MoveIt 2: Land, Sea, Space, where he listed examples of how the robots has been used effectively in all land, sea and space. He also covered the diverse applications of MoveIt, the successful migration of MoveIt to ROS2, and the hardware integration challenges during the process of the migration alongside the upcoming roadmap, with the possibility of MoveIt 3 in the making.

Dr Jan Becker, President, CEO, and Co-Founder of Apex.AI presented “Apex.OS - A safety-certified software framework based on ROS 2”. He shared about the Apex.OS software framework based on ROS 2, which has been certified according to ISO 26262 - the automotive functional safety norm - to the highest safety level ASIL D. He also described the advantages of working with open APIs as well as outlining the efficient software development process, which lead to the functional safety certification. Truly a remarkable milestone for the open sourced industry!

Shortly after, Nicholas Yeo, Senior Director of Advanced Technology, Asia Pacific, in Johnson & Johnson, shared that they are calling forward like-minded partners to collaborate and support their effort in realising the value in advancement in robotics to drive agility and resiliency in their supply chain environment. He then shared their early successes, strategies and approaches towards developing a successful framework using open-source technologies.

After the intermission break, we invited Marco A. Gutierrez, a Software Engineer at Open Robotics, to share on “Roadmap Update: Ignition and ROS2” where he gave a brief overview on the latest developments of two projects regarding robust robot behaviour across a wide variety of robotic platforms. Ignition, the new and improved simulation tool, has its origins from Gazebo classic. It is currently in Edifice release, where Open Robotics addressed improvements made to both Mac and Windows Support as well as the design for enhanced distributed simulation. In the next LTS release set to be around September 2021, Ignition Fortress, will be focusing on improvement for the GUI Tools, sensors, SDFormat, rendering, as well as overall performance. For ROS2, he has also mentioned that ROS1’s last LTS release Noetic Ninjemys will end May 2025 and has encouraged the audience to update to ROS2. ROS2 Galactic Geochelone will be addressing middleware, tooling, quality, performance as well as documentation.

We also had Zeng Yadan, a Research Associate under the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) to present on the “Automation of Food Handling Based on 3D Vision Systems Under ROS”. She shared on the use case of robotics and automation for meal assembly, whereby their system utilised both a delta and scara robot with RGBD cameras and conveyor belts. This automated food assembly process for a full range of food items can be served during meals in hospitals, inflight, fast-food chains, etc. The technologies applied can minimize the risk of infection and viral contamination during food assembly. A very interesting sharing on the usecase of robotics for food assembly by NTU!

Felix von Drigalski, a Senior Researcher at Omron Sinic X presented on “Machine Assembly with MoveIt”, where he introduced the evolution of the robot system from 2018 to 2020. He gave techniques and advice such as the in-hand pose estimation whereby extrinsic manipulation can be used to align objects. Several other techniques such as L-plate reorientation, dynamic centering and software structure were also mentioned. He also discussed which features are available (or coming up) in MoveIt and ROS, and how to avoid common pitfalls.

Timothy Tan, Robotics Lead & Senior Systems Engineer of GovTech also presented “Robotics Adoption & RMF”, where he presented the current Robots Middleware Framework Architecture, and how it can be further enhanced in the future for optimal deployment.

Last but not least, we had Harshavardhan Deshpande, a Research Engineer of ROS-Industrial Europe, Fraunhofer IPA, presenting on “New Horizons for European Open Source Robotics”, where he summarized the outcomes and Focused Technical Projects (FTP) of the ROSIN project, and introduced their next funding focusing on Cognitive Robotics & AI innovation with ROS-I as a lighthouse.

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

To conclude this year’s ROS-Industrial Workshop Asia Pacific, we thank every speaker for their presentation during the webinar. The ROS-Industrial Consortium Asia Pacific at ARTC will continue to work closely with our industry partners, 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 2022 for future ROS-Industrial activities!