ROS-Industrial Consortium Americas September '23 Community Meeting

/ Southwest Research Institute - San Antonio, TX/

On September 21 ROS-I Consorium Americas hosted a community meeting where a number of topics were covered. The presentations have been made available and the recording may be found over at the ROS-I YouTube channel.

To kick things off I reviewed some Consortium initiatives. Most recently we have been addressing concerns around industrial_core. There have been comments on a ROS 2 support issue about porting of industrial_core. However, as pointed out on the GitHub repository we will not be porting industrial_core due to the desire to take advantange of advances in OEM provided external motion interfaces and new approaches in driver development such as ros2_control based drivers and the recent Yaskawa micro-ROS based driver.

The idea is that OEMs will see opportunity in engaging the ROS community by offering a driver they are comfortable supporting, therefore there are not issues relative to performance as OEM changes occur within their software stack. We look forward to following up with an updated industrial driver specification, and will keep the community engaged on progress on that front.

From there we covered a couple focused projects. You can catch all the details in the slides, but the Robotic Blending Milestone 5 Focused Technical Project was covered, as well as work and progress on SWORD.

The FTP has already resulted in numerous enhancements to scan_n_plan_workshop and will also realize improved capabilities in a few other supporting repos.

SWORD came about as manufacturing engineering stakeholders continued to request ease of use tools, that also enabled greater ties to the CAD environmetn. SWORD seeks to provide, via a plug-in to FreeCAD, a simple UI for end-users to set up work cells and do various types of motion planning and motion tuning operations. We look forward to showing more, beyond what is in this deck or this deck, of SWORD in the coming months.

For the guest speaker at the meeting we were excited to have Pablo Garrido Sanchez from eProsima on board to share the latest around micro-ROS and supporting advanced ROS 2 deployments on microcontrollers and similar resource constrained devices. Check out his deck also included here and on the event page, as well as his full talk on the ROS-I YouTube channel.

Thanks to all those that attended and we look forward to hosting upcoming Developer Meetings and the Workshop at ROSCon. As always check out ros-i.org/events for the latest in chances to learn and collaborate with others excited about open source for industry.