ROS-Industrial at ROSCon 2012

This news is a little delayed, but with summer vacations and too much fun coding, time got away from me.  For those of you who didn’t get to attend ROSCon, ROS-Industrial, generated some buzz.

Morgan Quigley, the original architect of ROS, recognized ROS-Industrial in “The Photo Gallery of Robot Awesomeness” portion of his keynote address at the conference. He called ROS-Industrial a solution blending the “cutting-edge, high-level features” of ROS with the “rock-solid, low-level controls” associated with industrial robots, explaining that “the idea of ROS-Industrial is to combine these two worlds to try to get the best of both.”

Another keynote by Steven W. Hart from the joint GM-NASA Robonaut development team called ROS-Industrial a more robust version of ROS, “really pushing in the right direction in terms of adding the reliability, the testing, the performance … characterizing what works and what doesn’t.”
 
“Shaun Edwards came… to Willow Garage to… see what we were doing with our manipulation stack and apply it to industrial robots,” explained Willow Garage’s Sachin Chita, during a talk titled, Motion Planning in ROS. “And it was actually a fantastic effort.” He played a video of ROS-Industrial controlling a Motoman robot, performing collision-free grasping of multiple objects of different shapes and materials.

I’m very thankful for the kind mentions about ROS-Industrial at ROSCon.  I think it goes without saying that ROS-Industrial, a team effort in and of itself, is an extension of ROS, for which many deserve credit.