Recap: Successful ROS-I Consortium Americas Meeting in Chicago
/On April 7, the ROS-Industrial Consortium Americas hosted its annual meeting in Chicago following on the heels of the Automate show. The meeting brought together more than 60 people from across the industrial robotics industry to learn about, discuss, and plan for the future of open source software for manufacturing automation. The Consortium is now a world-wide organization led by SwRI in the Americas, Fraunhofer IPA in Europe, and A*STAR ARTC in the Asia Pacific region.
The annual meeting demarked a number of milestones for ROS-I:
- The open source software repository celebrated its 5th anniversary
- The Consortium celebrated its 4th year
- The Consortium is expanding to the Asia Pacific region with the RIC-AP Workshop occurring in May
- Global membership reached 50 members!
The ROS-I Consortium Americas meeting brought together representatives from across industry including end users, system integrators, robot OEMs, automation equipment OEMs, and researchers.
The Open Source Robotics Foundation was represented by Tully Foote who took questions during an open mic session, and also led a round table roadmapping discussion about ROS/ROS 2 core.
Matthew Robinson from Caterpillar gave an inspiring keynote presentation on the topic of Flexible Automation for Manufacturing in Heavy Industries.
The ROS-I Consortium is global! Each regional program manager presented an update about the progress and future plans for his/her region. Left to right: Min Ling Chan from RIC-Asia Pacific, Dr. Mirko Bordignon from RIC-Europe, and Paul Hvass from RIC-Americas.
During the afternoon session, Consortium members organized into groups to discuss specific technical roadmapping thrusts.
Meeting attendees also met with Focused Technical Project moderators to talk about one of the five new project topics that were introduced for 2017.
One of the chief benefits of the Consortium is the ability of members to sponsor Focused Technical Projects. These projects expand the capabilities of ROS-I and costs are shared by participating members so their resources are multiplied by their collaborators. This year, five project topics were announced and then discussed in a round table forum:
- Collaborative Robotic Fastener Installation
- Sensor Configuration and Calibration Assistant
- MoveIt! Code Sprint
- ROS-I Business Analytics Dashboard
- Robotic Edge Processing
To learn more about the ROS-I Consortium, please visit the Join Now page.
