The ROS-Industrial Consortium Asia Pacific Summit 2023 was held on the 29-30 November 2023. The event marked a milestone in ROS journey in Asia Pacific where we have seen the growth from the time it started in 2016 to where it is today.

Throughout the 2-day event, ROS-Industrial brought together experts and industry leaders to discuss topics that have shaped and will continue to shape the future of robotics. The Annual Summit, themed “The Everyday Robot”, signifies how robots will be an integral part of our daily lives, at work, at play and at social life. The presentations and demonstrations provided a glimpse of how robotics applications have unknowingly integrated into various aspects of our lives, from industry, service, education, among others.

The event also witnessed the signing of two MOUs. Firstly, an MOU with Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) was signed to reinforce our shared commitment to collaborate as part of the ROS-Industrial global consortia.

MOU Signing with Southwest Research Institute

Secondly, an MOU was signed between ARTC and seven esteemed IHLs in Singapore, namely Nanyang Technological University Singapore, National University of Singapore, Ngee Ann Polytechnic, Republic Polytechnic, Singapore Institute of Technology, Singapore Polytechnic and Singapore University of Technology and Design. This collaboration aims to harmonize the curriculum for ROS-based courses to respond to industry demand, nurturing talents for the future workforce.

Dr. Ettikan Kandasamy Karuppiah, Chief Technologist of Enterprise Business at the Asia Pacific South Region of NVIDIA, took the stage to deliver his keynote speech on "The Next Wave of Robotics and Edge AI." He discussed how NVIDIA ISAAC open platform leverages cutting-edge GPU technology to make robots more capable of handling complex tasks in dynamic environments, enabling them to operate autonomously and efficiently in a wide range of applications. Dr Ettikan also touches on the exciting world of GenAI and various use cases where GenAI can be leveraged on.

The three ROS-Industrial consortia also provided an update relating to the latest ROS2 developments and community outreach efforts within each of the regions.

Maria Vergo, Consortium Manager for ROS-Industrial Consortium Asia Pacific shared about the ongoing effort within Singapore to extend the use of Robotics Middleware Framework (RMF) to applications outside of healthcare, such as manufacturing and logistics.

Michael Ripperger, Technical Lead from ROS-Industrial Consortium Americas shared their work in robotics and shared ROS 10 years journey. ROS-Industrial Consortium Americas also shared about the Focus Technical Project (FTP) that was done in collaboration with their members on robotic blending with reconfigurable workflow and characterization-based path planning for quality assurance. Furthermore, Michael shared about the growth of ROS 2 driver support from leading robotics makers, such as Yaskawa, Kawasaki, ABB and UR. He also shared about SWORD, a platform that utilizes ROS-I tools in CAD-based environment among many other initiatives that ROS-Industrial Consortium Americas are pursuing.

Christoph Hellman Santos, Consortium Manager of ROS-Industrial Consortium Europe shared information about their software engineering and system integration, as well as their ongoing efforts in Europe. He also covered the different state funded research programs and projects throughout the years.

The afternoon session continued with engaging presentations by industry leaders.

Luca Della Vedova, Software Engineering Manager at Intrinsic, delved into "Unlocking the Potential of Robotics Through Automated Negotiation.” He introduced Open-RMF, an open-source framework for peer-to-peer negotiation to overcome deadlock issues in heterogeneous fleets of mobile robots, as well as discussed, the need for mobile robots to cooperate and dynamically share space in unstructured environments.

Swaminathan Vangal Ramamurthy, General Manager at OMRON Automation Centre, shared insights into "Happy Factory - Where Men and Machines Operate in Harmony." In his presentation, he discusses the evolving relationship between humans and machines, highlighting the shift from collaboration to harmony in the journey towards an Autonomous Society.

Dr. Zhang Jingbing, R&D Director for Smart Robotics Automation (SRA) at ARTC, rounded off the series with a presentation on "RMF 2.0 – Enabling Large Scale Implementation of RMF for Cross-Sectorial Applications." In his presentation, he dived into the NRPO-funded program, uncovering the advancements in RMF2.0 technologies designed to overcome challenges in deploying mobile robots, as well as the R&D efforts in proliferating the use of RMF for manufacturing and logistics applications.

Day 1 concluded with rotational workshops led by NVIDIA and ARTC where Dr. Ettikan of NVIDIA brought a topic on “The Future of 3D Collaboration with NVIDIA Omniverse and ISAAC Sim.” In this workshop, participants were treated to an immersive experience in leveraging NVIDIA ISAAC’s revolutionary capabilities and gained insights into utilizing Omniverse for scalable robotics simulation application development and synthetic data generation.

The second session was led by Dr Zhang Jingbing on "RMF – Market Readiness and Technology Requirements in Manufacturing, Logistic, and Facility Management”. During this workshop, facilitators shared about the existing effort to adapt RMF for cross-sectorial applications and prompted questions to guide the audience to share their vision of the future of RMF in these spaces.

The second day of the ROS-Industrial Consortium Asia Pacific Summit 2023 continued with another series of presentations and masterclasses.

Bobbie Couhbor, Senior Solutions Architect – Digital Innovation and Emerging Technologies at Amazon Web Services, started the day off with his keynote presentation titled “From Development to Production: Accelerating Robotic Development with Cloud Computing.” Participants gained insights on how several robotic vendors and consumers have used cloud computing to accelerate the development of their robotic capabilities and get their products to market rapidly without compromising on quality.

Next, we had Michael Sayre, Chief Executive Officer at KABAM Robotics, who shared insights on “Robots Among Us: Transforming Public Spaces and Resolving the Labor Availability Crisis”. He explored the transformative impact of technological advancements on revolutionizing facilities management and public safety globally, leading to enhanced efficiency and productivity through the deployment of Kabam’s Robots.

Daniel Nia, Chief Executive Officer at HOPE Technik, presented “Journey of HOPE’s Robotics”, where he covers the journey of the company’s robotics ventures, spanning UAVs, drones, AV, AMR, UGVs, mobile manipulators, robotic cells, and exoskeletons.

Zhi Kai Lim, Senior Field Application Engineer at Real-Time Innovations (RTI), delved into his presentation “DDS in Robotic Systems: Advancements in Technologies and Ecosystem Collaboration”. He covers the pivotal role of RTI's DDS technology in advancing distributed systems, emphasizing its significance in achieving real-time advanced data management, ensuring data continuity, and shaping the future of technology integration and interoperability.

After the lunch break, the afternoon sessions commenced with Reeve Chong, Co-Founder, CTO and Managing Director at Hand Plus Robotics (Malaysia Office), presenting on “Designing, Assembling, and Deploying Reliable Robotic Packing Solutions for Large Scale Operations”. He showcased the successful deployment of a 6-robot packing system enabled by leveraging ROS to its fullest potential, achieving efficiency, reliability, and significant manpower savings.

Reeve Chong, Co-Founder, CTO and Managing Director at Hand Plus Robotics (Malaysia Office

Lastly, Professor Mohan Rajesh Elara, Provost’s Chair Professor at SUTD, concluded the series of presentations sharing his perspectives in a presentation titled “The Rise of Reconfigurable Robots: SUTD Initiatives.” He explored the challenges and advancements in the development of reconfigurable robots, focusing on deployment use cases in the maintenance domain and fostering a local ecosystem of robotic startups that were mostly spined off from many local talents from SUTD.

The remaining time in the afternoon comprised of a series of masterclasses specializing in different focus tracks led by various industry experts.

Santosh Balaji and Adriel Ho, from ROS-Industrial Consortium Asia Pacific, delved into the fundamentals of behavior trees and their applications in robotics in his masterclass titled “Introduction to Behavior Trees and its Applications in Robotics.” Participants gained a profound understanding of behavior tree fundamentals, acquired practical skills for real-world task modeling, and explored the application of behavior trees in navigation tasks. His masterclass also featured a special guest virtually – Davide Faconti, the maintainer of BehaviourTree.CPP.

Christoph Hellmann Santos, from ROS-Industrial Consortium Europe, guided participants through the creation of a robot arm in ROS 2 from the ground up in his masterclass titled “ROS 2 CANopen Unleashed: Creating a Robot Arm from the Ground Up.” Utilizing ros2_canopen, attendees learned and gained a short hands-on experience on the process of building a robot arm in ROS 2.

Michael Ripperger, from ROS-Industrial Consortium Americas, conducted a masterclass titled “Tuning Motion Planning Parameters for Manipulators.” This session explored the practical aspects of fine-tuning motion planning parameters, incorporating algorithms such as industrial motion, OMPL, Descartes, and TrajOpt.

Vinu Sivanantham, from SUTD, led a masterclass titled “Enabling Self-Reconfigurable Robots using ROS.” Participants had the unique opportunity to utilize the Smorphi robot, unlocking the potential of versatile solutions for complex tasks in dynamic environments.

There were also booths stationed during the summit that consisted of prominent industry members in Singapore, namely Hope Technik, Weston Robot, Flexiv, Augmentus, Pepperl+Fuchs, KABAM Robotics, and ROS-Industrial, offered hands-on experiences with state-of-the-art solutions.

We would like to extend our deepest gratitude to all participants who graced us with their presence, contributing to the vibrant discussions, engaging presentations throughout the 2-day event.

A special acknowledgment goes out to our partners, AutomationSG, JTC Corporation, National Robotics Programme (NRP), and Workforce Singapore (WSG), who have made this event possible. We would also like to extend our sincere gratitude to our booth partners, Flexiv, Pepperl+Fuchs, Kabam Robotics, Hope Technik, Augmentus and Weston Robot.

We anticipate 2024’s edition of the annual summit, and look forward to more collaborations, and the continuous evolution of robotics, as well as the community’s contributions to open-sourced. See you in our next edition of the event!

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Shaping the Future of Robotics: Highlights from the ROS-Industrial Consortium Asia Pacific Summit 2023

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