Fraunhofer IPA: RIC-Americas Member of the Week

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Fraunhofer IPA logo.JPG

The ROS-Industrial Consortium Europe led by the Robot and Assistive Systems department at Fraunhofer IPA (IPA), which designs robot systems and automation solutions for industrial applications and the services sector, recently has made exciting strides in the robotics industry. Among their impressive feats of engineering are the Care-O-bot 3 and rob@work 3 mobile manipulators. Check out:

IPA was an early ROS adopter, using it with the platforms mentioned above, and for a number of client-funded industrial automation projects. As SwRI sought a European collaborator for ROS-Industrial, IPA was a natural fit, given its leadership both in industrial robotics R&D, and its ROS expertise. IPA has many laudable accomplishments in the ROS community:

  • In May, they hosted ROSCon 2013, which brought together the global ROS community, and was a widely heralded success.
  • They launched an Eclipse toolkit for ROS called BRIDE, which enables model-based design for ROS (signal flowgraph drag-and-drop user interface).
  • They are contributing researchers for the Factory-in-a-Day project, which will create new agile manufacturing capabilities to address high-mix low-volume workflows; these capabilities will be made public through the ROS-Industrial repository.
  • They are leading the Lean Automation (LIAA) project, which will develop human-robot co-working capabilities based on the ROS-Industrial framework.
  • They used ROS in many earlier European research projects. Some of the code has been released through public repositories (e.g. SRS, ACCOMPANY, ect.).

There are also a couple of important upcoming events that will take place at IPA in Stuttgart:

  • March 6, 2014: 2nd ROS-Industrial Training
  • June 26th, 2014: 2nd ROS-Industrial Workshop aligned with European Consortium Kickoff Meeting

For more about the ROS-Industrial Consortium-EU, check out their website.