Summary of ROS-Industrial Conference 2022

The 10th edition of the ROS-Industrial Conference took place on December 15-16, 2022 in Stuttgart, Germany and remotely. During the conference, 55 participants present in Stuttgart and an online audience of more than 200 people attended 17 talks in six sessions. The goal of the conference was to show and discuss what currently is possible in the ROS2 ecosystem when it comes to industrial applications.

Creating Manipulation cells in ROS2 has now stronger tool support

In the first session with the title “Manipulation Workshop”, Ragesh Ramachandran (Fraunhofer IPA) explained how you can currently setup a robotic manipulation cell that is based on ROS2 and controlled via moveit2. The workshop showed that you can export a model of your cell from CAD and create a fully functional manipulation cell using off the shelf components such as the universal robot driver for ROS2. In the second talk of the session, Michal Milkowski (Universal Robots) presented the integration of UR Script with ROS2.

Bosch uses ROS in product development

The second session of conference focused on boader topics. Dr.-Ing. Werner Kraus (Fraunhofer IPA) reported the newest robot sales statisctics and pointed out that robot solutions are a key factor for Europe staying economically relevant even with growing demographic issues. Dr. Ralph Lange (Bosch) explained in his talk, how ROS and ROS2 are used at Bosch, a company that has been active in the ROS community since the beginning. ROS and ROS2 are used in many research and development departments at Bosch. ROS and ROS2 are also integrated into a small number of products. Maria Vergo (ARTC) explained about the current progress of spreading ROS in the Asia Pacific region as well as recent and planned developments of ROS2 components by the ROS-Industrial Consortium Asia & Pacific. She highlighted the recently published packages Easy Perception Deployment and Easy Manipulation Deployment that simplify the deployment of perception and manipulation in ROS2. Michael A. Ripperger (SwRI) talked about developments that are currently ongoing in the Americas region of the consortium. A major development ongoing there is the industry friendly motion planner tesseract as well as a plugin for FreeCAD that will simplify the integration of ROS and CAD models significantly.

OpenRMF enables hardware-agnostic fleet management with building infrastructure integration

The next session was title “Navigation and ROS2”. Marcel Schnizler (Pilz) explained in his talk, how the PSENScan laserscanner can be used to easily build safe mobile robot systems using ROS or ROS2. The second presenter Aaron Chong (Open Robotics) introduced OpenRMF to the European audience. OpenRMF is a manufacturer-agnostic fleet management system for robotics that is currently developed by Open Robotics and others. Next to the fleet management capabilities, it also features integration with building infrastructure such as doors and elevators. The ecosystem currently supports more than 10 different robots for different kind of purposes. The system is deployed in multiple hospitals in Singapore at this time. Victor Mayoral-Vilches revealed information about his start-up Acceleration Robotics that aims at integrating hardware acceleration into the ROS2 ecosystem. The start-up is heavily involved in the development of new ROS2 features that simplify the usage of hardware acceleration such as GPUs and FPGAs. It has also developed a Robot Processing Unit that can be used by robot developers to leverage the newly developed hardware acceleration features.

Universal Robots and Yaskawa Motoman integrate ROS2 interfaces into their robot controllers

In the last session of the first day “Manipulation and ROS2”, Rune Søe-Knudsen (Universal Robots) and Felix Exner (FZI) presented the latest updates to the Universal Robots ROS2 robot diver. Liana Bertoni and Davide Torelli (IIT) explained the capabilities of the ROS2 End-effector framework that aims to facilitate integration, planning and control of heterogeneous robotic end-effectors. Ted Miller (Yaskawa Motoman) introduced MotoROS2 and ongoing driver development for ROS2. The interesting thing about the driver is that it runs directly on the robot controller using MicroROS. He announced that the driver will soon be published for public beta testing.

ROS2 fieldbus interfaces are becoming available

Day 2 of the conference started of with the session “ROS2 and Hardware Interfaces”. In the first talk of the session, Dr.-Ing. Denis Stogl (Stogl Robotics) explained the different features of ros2_control. For robot drivers and other hardware interfaces, ros2_control provides the tools to build hardware-agnostic interfaces as well as an infrastructure for controllers and a collection of ready-to-use controllers for different purposes. Maciej Bednarczyk from ICUBE at Université de Straßbourg presented their EtherCAT stack, which leverages ros2_control to enable simple integration into ROS2. The stack is available as v1.0.0 release. Christoph Hellmann Santos from Fraunhofer IPA presented ros2_canopen, a stack to integrate ROS2 with CANopen. The stack provides different interfaces to control CANopen Devices from ROS2, one of them being ros2_control.

ROS2 is starting to be embedded in to industrial devices such as PLCs

In the embedded platforms session, Andrei Kholodnyi from Wind River presented the integration of ROS2 with the Yocto framework. Yocto is a toolchain, which enables companies to create tailor-made Linux distributions for their high performance industrial computing products. The integration of ROS2 into the Yocto framework is achieved by the meta-layer “meta-ros”. The second talk of the session stressed the importance of Yocto for industrial equipment. Hermann Spies and Özkan Öztürk from Phoenix Contact presented work on integrating ROS2 with their PLCNext device series. The PLCNext devices use Yocto for their operating system. The ROS2 Bridge is integrated into the PLCNext devices using Docker containers that run alongside the IEC 61131 execution environment directly on the PLC hardware.

Intrinsic to strongly support the ROS community

On the first day of the conference, it became known that Intrinsic, a company that plans to democratize robotics by providing simpler and hardware-agnostic robot software with AI integration has bought parts of Open Robotics, the foundation that governs the ROS ecosystem. Interesting is, that Intrinsic is financed by Alphabet. In a short statement, Torsten Kröger, CTO at Intrinsic, and Brian Gerky, CEO of Open Robotics explained their plans and what the acquisition means for the ROS community. From their statement, it seems that the ROS ecosystem has gained a financially strong supporter in Intrinsic and will see a lot of work towards more industrial deployment in the next years.

The conference has shown that the ROS-Industrial Community has been quite active during the pandemic years and we are a looking into a bright future for open source robotics.