ROS-Industrial Program Update

I thought I would take some time to provide an update on the current state of ROS-Industrial.

Consortium - The ROS-Industrial Consortium is one step closer. We have put some preliminary information out of the web (http://www.swri.org/4org/d10/msd/automation/ros-industrial-consortium.htm) and have created a video ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h54YzGIZFt4 ). We are very excited for this opportunity to expand the support for ROS-Industrial. Feel free to share this information with anybody you think might have interest.

Twitter - We’ve created a twitter account for ROS-Industrial: http://twitter.com/rosindustrial Follow us for status updates. We will be posting videos, articles, and other information as it becomes available.

Freetail Program - We have talked to several companies that have identified “bin picking" or “kitting" as opportunities of interest. As a result, we have approved another round of funding for refining and impoving pick and place capability. The software developed under this program (code named Freetail) will be released open source ( http://code.google.com/p/swri-ros-pkg/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk%2Ffreetail ). We are actively looking for commercial partners and others to assist in this research.

Mini-Project List - I have updated the mini project list on the google code wiki (http://ros.org/wiki/Industrial/Roadmap/ ). I would like to invite you guys to give us feedback on the list. Additions are also welcome. This list will be included as potential projects for funding by the Consortium once it is funded. If you have a particular need or project idea, this might be a possible way to get it developed.

Volunteer Opportunities - We are still feeling our way out on managing ROS-Industrial as an open source program. We truly believe that community involvement will be the key to it’s success. For those who might be interested, I would like to know if there are volunteers to create robot configurations for the various types of industrial robots. We have tutorials on the wiki. By simply generating these configuration files, we can give people the ability to test high level functions, such as path planning, using the Rviz visualization environment.