RICA Community Meeting Puts a Bow on 2023 Developments

/ Southwest Research Institute - San Antonio, TX/

The ROS-Industrial Consortium Americas hosted a fourth quarter end of year Community Meeting that highlighted recent develoments and upcoming events for 2024.

Matt Robinson led off the meeting with programmatic updates and some of the findings from the recent roadmap workshops and highlighted that a roadmap revisit at the ROS-Industrial open source project level would be coming for 2024. Furthermore, updates on training, with a proposed schedule was shared along with the announcment of the ROS-Industrial Consortium 2024 Annual Meeting.

The 2024 edition of the RICA Annual Meeting will take place March 27-28 and include demonstrations and lab tours. There is also the oppportunity to consider some hands on workshop time and surveying of the membership will take place early in 2024 to nail down specific events and Annual Meeting content. The event listing will continued to be updated as details are firmed up.

New feature enabling submesh visualization in noether

For the technical portion of the program Michael Ripperger shared recent workshops and technical updates to various ROS-Industrial tools and resources. The first noted was REACH hihgligthed by the recent ROSCon 2023 workshop that took place in New Orleans. There are now two working demos included in the workshop repository, which will eventually be moved to the ROS-Industrial GitHub organization. This workshop may be offered as a stand alone workshop or as part of an existing ROS-I training event.

Next, Michael shared a recent enhancement to noether, the tool path planning repository within ROS-Industrial. For some time, noether has supported region selection and application of tool paths within a selected region. However, it was not able to provide a visualization of that sub-mesh. Visualizations of sub-meshes has recently been merged and this enables both an improved visualization experience for an end user, but also the means to more thoroughly understand how an automated segmentation function is performing during the application development process. This is exactly the use case for the ROS-I Consortium Focused Technical Project Robotic Blending Milestone 5, where there is interest in applying tool paths in human drawn boundaries.

Tool path tolerancing to enable improve trajopt performance

Tyler Marr then dove into recent developments within Tesseract and in particular TrajOpt. The first update was the ability to use custom tasks in Tesseract motion planning pipelines. Tyler provided a couple examples in the presentation and provided a URL reference in how this is used in the Scan-N-Plan workshop.

From here Tyler covered the ability to apply Cartesian tolerance waypoints for Trajopt. Historically, Trajopt would simply attempt to find a solution for a proivded tool path or set of way points wihtout understanding what additional flexibility may be available. By enabling the application of tolerances in x,y,z, roll, pitch, and possibly free rotation around z, trajopt has greater liklihood of finding a solution. In the recording there are comparison screen casts of before and after leveraging this feature. It is anticipated this will enable a greater array of more complex tool path presentations to be solved via Trajopt. This is currently a pull request, but it is anticipated to be merged before the end of '23.

Overview of sword - ROS-I planning tools in a CAD environment

Michael wrapped up the technical session with an update on SWORD, the ROS-I planning tool that operates in a CAD environment. An alpha release is planned in early January 2024, with a website and the ability to experiment with a trial version. If you have interest in experimenting with SWORD, feel free to contact any of the ROS-I Americas team.

Thanks to all those that made this meeting. You can find the presentation material here and over at the event listing. The recording is linked directly and can be found at the ROS-I YouTube Channel.

As always reach out if there are questions or if you are interested in contributing or being involved wiht the ROS-Industrial open source project or the Consortium. Have a great end of year and start to 2024 and as always thank you for your interest and support in open source for industry.