ROSCon 2022 Rewind

ROSCon 2022 Group Photo

This October I was fortunate enough to attend ROSCon with fellow colleagues Jerry Tower and Michael Ripperger in beautiful Kyoto, Japan. By luck, it just so happened that the month-long trip I booked to Japan one year ago lined up with Japan's borders opening and the conference's location and dates. Now that I'm back in America and have my work and personal business back in order, I'd like to share with you my ROSCon 2022 experience.

With an attendance of approximately 800 ROS developers ranging from absolute beginners to seasoned industry and academia experts, there was something for everyone at ROSCon. The panels were particularly useful to better understand the current state of ROS, ROS2, future plans, and concerns of the community. I found the presentations about integrating CANopen with ROS 2 in addition to the development work on a ROS 2 simulator with the Unreal Engine 4 interesting as well. The full ROSCon program with videos of the presentations can be found here:  https://roscon.ros.org/2022/.

Formant Robotics' robot dog being controlled via a Steam Deck roaming around the conference grounds during lunch.

The conference's exhibitors covered a healthy spectrum of different roles necessary to bring robots to the forefront of industry. This spectrum included companies that specialized in cutting edge hardware necessary for perception, navigation, and path planning, to companies that regularly deploy hundreds of robots to factory floors with cloud services. I also took this opportunity to visit with our ROS-I Asia Pacific counterparts in-person at their booth which featured an impressive demonstration of two robots working together to pick and place items into manipulated bins.

Overall, ROSCon was a great success and Open Robotics did a fantastic job putting everything together. We will most certainly make it to New Orleans for ROSCon 2023!