This was ROS-Industrial Conference #RICEU2019 (Day 3)

ROS-Industrial Conference 2019

December 10-12, 2019

Seven years after the very first public event entirely devoted to discussing the potential benefits of a shared, open-source framework for industrial robotics and automation, Fraunhofer IPA hosted the 7th edition of the ROS-Industrial Conference on December 10 to 12, 2019 (all slides and videos are linked under the program) .

This is the third instalment of a series of three consecutive blog posts, presenting content and discussions according to the event days including the follwing sessions:

1. Day 1 with “EU ROS Updates” (watch all talks in this YouTube playlist of Day 1)

2. Day 2 with “Software and System Integration” & “Robotics meets IT” (watch all talks in this YouTube Playlist of Day 2)

3. Day 3 with “Hardware and Application highlights” & “Platforms and Community” (watch all talks in this YouTube Playlist of Day 3)

Day 3: Hardware and Application Highlights

On the third and last conference day, speakers came from Universal Robot, KUKA, and Pilz just to name a few examples. The opening presentation held Paul Evans talking about ROS-Industrial North Americas updates and highlights from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI). He summed up ROS-Industrial activities including membership growth, ROS2 demo on booth at Automate 2019, meetings, trainings (focusing on ROS2), initiatives, community engagement… Some technical highlights are for example the Scan-N-Plan tools that enable real-time robot trajectory planning from 3D scan data. Within the project A5, robotic applications for the aerospace industry were developed, e.g. collaborative and adaptive solutions.

Aerospace manufacturing was also the key domain Rik Tonnaer from the research center “Smart Advanced Manufacturing XL“, cooperating with TU Delft, talked about. This industry is challenging for automation solutions because of the variety of processes, which almost all require human dexterity, craftsmanship, and adaptation to variations. In addition, there are large part sizes, similar but not identical products and processes and a long legacy of approved and certified processes. Using the example of a drilling process, Tonnaer demonstrated how an automation solution can be developed despite the challenges mentioned. The research center aims at deploying the first drilling systems beginning of 2021. Technology transfer to other industries is also on the agenda. ROS is their platform of choice to maximize reuse, collaboration, and separation info functional components.

Paul Evans (Southwest Research Institute / ROS-Industrial North America) presenting ROS-Industrial North America updates & SwRI application highlights

The third contribution came from robot manufacturer KUKA, a new prominent contributor to ROS. Thomas Ruehr started his presentation explaining how to interface KUKA robots with ROS via KUKA Robot Controller and KUKA System Software (KSS) as well as via KUKA Sunrise/RoboticsAPI. A product specifically benefiting from ROS is the navigation for the mobile manipulation platform KMR iiwa. Apart from that, there are already many KUKA robots running on ROS. The company is working on a more canonical offering with respect to a catalog of URDF models and official drivers for KSS, sunrise robots and the mobile platform. KUKA is actively asking the community for KUKA specific needs to help strengthen the company’s engagement in open-source software.

Another prominent robot manufacturer is heavily working on ROS support: Universal Robots. Anders Billesø Beck presented the new UR ROS driver addressing pre-existing hurdles like a clouded landscape with more than 200 variants of a ROS driver for UR and instability towards API changes. The new driver launched in October 2019 is the result of a Focused Technical Project with FZI Research Center for Information Technology that was funded by the EU project ROSIN (see presentation on day 1 for more information). Main advantages of the new driver are its ease of use and better performance and stability. The driver will remain open source and rely on future community contributions. It offers a stable control interface, teach-pendant integration, factory calibration in ROS, safety compliance speed scaling, eSeries tool communication and full safety compliance. UR is now working towards industrial-grade performance and stability.

In addition to the first lecture by Paul Evans, Erik Unemyr presented activities and application highlights from the ROS-Industrial Asia Pacific consortium managed by the Advanced Remanufacturing and Technology Centre (ARTC) of A*STAR (Agency for Science, Technology and Research) in Singapore. As is the case for Europe and North Americas, the Asia Pacific Consortium continues to support members, provide ROS trainings and other successful ROS events on a regular basis, and plans to offer ROS2 based trainings going forward. Unemyr covered a few of ARTC’s core robotics technology focus areas, including the mission to lower the technology barrier for adopting robotics for various applications. One way to achieve this is using a model-based teaching approach of robots using 3D computer vision. Another concept is using Augmented Reality teaching to enable simplified robotic use cases. The second highlight topic relate to providing more flexibility in automating high-mix applications that require toolpath generation. Unemyr also highlighted a key Singapore-sponsored project currently in development intended for large scale interoperable robotic deployments using ROS-enabled robots, called the Robotics Middleware Framework (RMF).

Erik Unemyr (Advanced Remanufacturing and Technology Centre (ARTC)) presenting ROS-Industrial Asia Pacific updates & ARTC application highlights

Stefan Doerr from Fraunhofer IPA presented the topic “Towards Plug & Play solutions for autonomous navigation of mobile robots and AGV”. The versatile navigation stack from his team does not need any markers or additional infrastructure, is mostly platform-, hardware- and sensor-independent and based on ROS. With its three core components long-term SLAM, zone-based global route planning and dynamic, local path and trajectory optimization the software has already been deployed on a variety of systems starting from vacuum cleaners and ending at autonomously driving trucks. Its plug & play technologies are the key to the widespread of mobile robots and AGVs in industry. The latest deployment of the software was successfully realized for Smart Transport Robots at BMW production plants. Challenges there were sparse sensor data, a highly variable environment with hardly any static structure, interaction with forklifts, trugger trains etc., large environments of more than 100,000 square meters and limited maneuverability. Ongoing research work at IPA is about machine learning for the navigation stack.

The company Pilz, well-known for its safety technologies, talked about its safety certified ROS-native industrial manipulator PRBT 6. Manuel Schoen presented the different modules for service robotics applications and how they benefit from ROS. The robot does not need any proprietary controller or teach-pendant but can be used directly with ROS. The safety controller for safety functionality is partially implemented in ROS as well. Since the robot itself in combination with the safety controller is certifiable under ISO 10218-1, the system integrator can focus on the application. Applications can be realized with the robot running automatically, running with manually reduced speed, or with manually high speed. In 2019, Pilz also presented results of a Focused Technical Project funded by the ROSIN project. The FTP implemented a trajectory generator with a MoveIt-interface for easy planning and execution of Cartesian standard-paths (LIN, PTP, CIRC) according to industrial requirements. In addition, the blending of multiple sequential motion commands was realized.

ROS is also entering the retail domain. This is done within the framework of the “REFILLs” project (Robotics Enabling Fully-Integrated Logistics Lines for Supermarkets). Jonathan Cacace from PRISMA Lab of University of Naples "Federico II" talked about the project’s aim: Novel robotics systems in close and smart collaboration with humans will allow addressing the main in-store logistics processes for retail stores, leading to a smarter self-refilling in supermarkets. Challenges like the changing environment, variety of objects, or tight work spaces have to be considered. To automatize for example the depalletizing of heterogeneous and cluttered objects, technologies like image processing, perception, grasping, and manipulation must be realized. Therefore, the ROS-based motion planner MoveIt plays a key role in the software development.

Manuel Schön (Pilz GmbH & Co. KG) presenting Safety Certified ROS-native Industrial Manipulator

Day 3: Platforms and Community

Coming to the end of the conference, Penny Scully from Jungle gave an overview about the offerings of the company. It aims at connecting industrial partners and  robotics developers who offer “robofacturing”, a software defined manufacturing process of using robotics and AI technologies within the production of goods. Flexibility, time to market, and autonomy are main criteria of their offering. Jungle is developing an online platform to resell resolved challenges to a wider portfolio of industrial partners, like an app store for robotics, to extend their developers reach into the manufacturing industry. Processes like quality inspection, pressing, and trimming have already been implemented. Labelling, battery module assembly, and (un-)packing are in the future scope of the robofacturing process.

Benjamin Goldschmidt of Silexica highlighted its new SLX Analytics product. The German startup called attention to sporadic errors that occur in nowaday's complex software systems (e.g. an Autonomous Driving System). Because the complexity of such systems is so high, the developers are facing the challenge of understanding the overall system behaviour and knowing, in case of an error, which software component failed and why. With SLX Analytics, Silexica addresses these needs by providing automated testing of system metrics, enabling customers to uncover system-level defects early on and thereby reducing the risk of dangerous defects in the product. The first product release took place in January 2020. 

The conference concluded with a contribution of the Eclipse Foundation summarizing the importance of open-source communities for robotics. Philippe Krief presented two company stories from Bosch and MQTT. Their lessons learned: Communities do not only help being competitive against “bigger fishes” but they are also a great vehicle to gain visibility and recognition. That is why Eclipse is launching an Industrial Robotics Working Group collaborating with different ROS-related research projects like RobMoSys, ROSIN, or SeRoNet. Krief’s motto “Open-Source is a journey, not a destination” does not only  describe the work of the Eclipse Foundation very well, but is a nice closing word for the ROS-Industrial Conference 2019.

All three consortia, their members and managing institutes like Fraunhofer IPA are happy and proud to be part of this journey. Let us continue it for example with #RICEU2020! For some more impressions of the whole event please watch the event video.

This was ROS-Industrial Conference #RICEU2019 (Day 2)

ROS-Industrial Conference 2019

December 10-12, 2019

Seven years after the very first public event entirely devoted to discussing the potential benefits of a shared, open-source framework for industrial robotics and automation, Fraunhofer IPA hosted the 7th edition of the ROS-Industrial Conference on December 10 to 12, 2019.

This is the second instalment of a series of three consecutive blog posts, presenting content and discussions according to the event days including the follwing sessions:

1. Day 1 with “EU ROS Updates” (watch all talks in this YouTube playlist of Day 1)

2. Day 2 with “Software and System Integration” & “Robotics meets IT” (YouTube Playlist of Day 2)

3. Day 3 with “Hardware and Application highlights” & “Platforms and Community”

Day 2 Part 1: Software and System Integration

The second day of the ROS-Industrial Conference featured speakers from several well-known companies that have been using ROS for a long time or started using it recently and are developing it further together with the community. While some companies already spoke at the conference in earlier years, there were also speakers from new contributors. This shows that the interest in ROS from the industrial side is still unbroken and increasing.

Matt Hansen from Intel opened the second day. He presented the ROS developments of his company, which mainly include a Robot Development Kit (RDK) and navigation software. Intel especially focuses on the adoption of ROS2. The RDK supports the development and implementation of software components for mapping and planning, machine vision (point cloud generation, object detection, face and gesture detection and more) and intelligent handling or grasp detection. The comprehensive project navigation2 pursues the goals of providing a customizable (thanks to behavior trees), modular and extensible software. To ensure quality and maintainability, an automated system test was created. It uses Gazebo and a Turtlebot 3 model to test localization, transition into the ‘active’ lifecycle state and navigation.

Matt Hansen, Intel, giving a overview on ROS2 Robot Dev Kit and Navigation2

ROS2 tracing was the topic of Ingo Lütkebohle from Bosch. Tracing is important because there are currently various problems in performance analysis and execution monitoring, for example: How long does my system take to react? How much resource is it consuming? Factors like distributed systems or repetitive periodic processing complicate performance analyses. Lütkebohle explained, which kind of information is recordable, which tracepoints exist in ROS2, and how static and dynamic tracing differ. In the end, he gave an example of a tracing installation and implementation process.

ROS as the basis for a framework with which industrial robots do no longer need to be programmed but can be intuitively instructed: Pablo Quilez from the startup drag&bot, whose first research activities took place at Fraunhofer IPA, spoke about this framework and first industrial projects. With the help of a graphical user interface, the user creates a robot program via drag&drop of function blocks. drag&bot is manufacturer independent, offers the same user interface for different robots, and does not require any expert knowledge in robotics. It is an open platform that third parties can extend, e.g. with ROS packages

Arne Roennau and his colleagues from FZI Research Center for Information Technology developed ROS based Cartesian controllers that enable motion, force, and compliance control for robotic manipulators. Cartesian control in task space is necessary for closed loop force control, direct teaching, contact-rich manipulation, manual guidance. That is why FZI worked on active Cartesian compliance using three controller modules and implemented them for a car door sealing assembly, a satellite assembly and many other applications. The goals here were to give the robot error correcting contact skills for autonomous execution that are transferable to different robots.

More contributions to ROS presented Steve Peters from Open Robotics, an institution that has been supporting and evolving ROS and Gazebo since many years. In this context, Open Robotics offers several developer tools to facilitate the use and integration of open source software and supports upcoming ROS releases like Melodic (May 2023) and Noetic (2025), the latter probably being the last ROS1 distribution. Together with other companies in the ROS2 Technical Steering Committee, Open Robotics helps managing the roadmap, contributes development efforts and sets developer policies. Finally yet importantly, interfacing ROS and Gazebo has been on the agenda of Open Robotics for quite some years.

Gazebo simulations were also the main topic in the presentation of Musa Morena Marcusso Manhães. She works for Bosch where she develops a Python library for scripting and rapid-prototyping of Gazebo simulations. So far, there are several application-dependent difficulties with respect to simulations (e.g. generation variations of worlds and models, scripting of world layouts and event-based actions). Marcusso’s approach is the procedural generation, a technique from gaming development. It enables rapid-prototyping of simulation scenarios and abstractions to simulation entities, allows scripting of Gazebo simulations, extends templating options for robot descriptions and improves the conversion between URDF and SDF.

Musa Morena Marcusso Manhães, BOSCH, presenting A Python library for scripting and rapid-prototyping of simulated Gazebo models and worlds called pcg_gazebo_pkgs

Nadia Hammoudeh Garcia from Fraunhofer IPA highlighted the potentials of the combination of model-driven engineering (MDE) and ROS. Among others, ROS developers can benefit from the definition of common design patterns and specifications, model checker techniques and automated code generators.Since there are already about 4000 hand-written open-source ROS packages, Hammoudeh not only develops tools to generate code but also to automatically extract ROS models from the existing code. She released an eclipse-based tooling with a graphical interface and model editors as well as domain-specific languages to the models. All her contributions are also part of the German research project “Service Robotic Network” (see presentation from day 1 for more information).

Not only MDE can facilitate the deployment of ROS but also the tools from MathWorks, MATLAB and Simulink. Shashank Sharma presented how this works, which advantages the tools offer, and how they address common challenges of autonomous systems, e.g. multi-domain expertise, complexity, and performance evaluation. He also discussed the key advantages of Model-Based Design and how it can be applied to the robotics and autonomous systems. Therefore, MATLAB helps analyzing and visualizing ROS data and prototype algorithms. A Simulink model allows automated code (C and C++) and ROS node generation as well as prototyping new algorithms through the ROS interface. Finally, the tools from the company allow incorporate ROS in Model-Based Design workflows

Day 2 Part 2: Robotics meets IT

Robotics and IT are becoming more and more interlinked – this was already evident at the ROS-Industrial Conference 2018, when Roger Barga from Amazon Web Services (AWS) was invited to present a new service for robot applications “Amazon Robomaker“. Now, one year later, he presented the status of the service. It offers comprehensive functionalities for each of the three stages “design and develop“ (storage, logging, metrics, image and video recognition etc.), “test and verify“ (simulation tools for thousands of concurrent simulations and model training), and “deploy and update“ (control and multiple deployments, manage robots across multiple brands, deployment over-the-air). In addition, AWS contributed source code to ROS2 core, along with tools for ROS2 to improve functionality and code quality. The company will continue these efforts.

Roger Barga, AWS Amazon web services, giving a keynote on The Robotic Edge

Andrei Kholodnyi from Wind River addressed the problem that there is an increasing amount of robots using ROS but a decreasing amount of embedded software engineers. He stated that people do not want to program bit and bytes anymore. That is why Wind River provides the downloadable SDK VxWorks for non-commercial usage. ROS2 is built on top of the VxWorks SDK and developers can deploy and run it on ARM and Intel.

Canonical, as the company who publishes Ubuntu, gives developers support for simple, secure, and scalable robotic deployment in the field of ROS. Rhys Davies, a product manager for Canonical's robotics initiatives presented tools like Snaps, containerized software packages for all Linux distributions, the company’s efforts for continued support for Python 2, and Extended Security Maintenance (EMS) for ROS, to maintain a robot past its usual lifetime. With these offerings, Canonical aims at supporting users to move to ROS2 and to facilitate the transition of robot systems already in practice.

The company eProsima, represented by Jaime Martin Losa, offers the open-source DDS for ROS2 “eProsima Fast RTPS”. This DDS offers real-time behavior (static allocations, non-blocking calls, sync and async publishing), intra-process communication and discovery server. Martin Losa detailed performance features using the example of an iRobot framework and gave numbers with respect to benchmarking criteria like latency and throughput. More features are currently being developed with the help of project funding from ROSIN (see presentation from day 1 for more details).

Besides Amazon, Microsoft was one of the most prominent companies presenting at ROS-Industrial Conference. Gunter Logemann talked about ROS applications with Visual Studio Code and Azure. Since June 2018, the IT giant has been contributing to the ROS development and since then, 279 ROS packages have been enabled on Windows. New features are for example the Azure IoT_Hub connector, Azure Kinect ROS Node, and Windows ML node. The developer environment Visual Studio Code offers several ROS extensions like automatic workspace activation, starting, stopping, and viewing the ROS system status, and automatically discover build tasks. ROS2 support is also included.

Both offensive and defensive security aspects were presented by Endika Gil Uriarte and Victor Mayoral from Alias Robotics. They explained that the network and transport layers are the most vulnerable points in an OS and not ROS, ROS2 or the application itself. For them, security is a process and cannot be “finished” with a certain technology. The company offers a variety of security tools and has profound knowledge concerning vendors as well as ROS and ROS2 thanks to its public robot vulnerability database and to a robot security survey done in conjunction with Joanneum Research Robotics. One of the solutions to enhance security is the company’s toolbox for robot security “alurity”. Soon, there will also be RIS, the Robot Immune System for UR robots offering defensive robot security.

audience at ROS-Industrial Conference 2019 at Fraunhofer IPA in Stuttgart, gErmany

Analytics for autonomous driving and large-scale sensor data processing was the topic of Jan Wiegelmann working for Autovia. The challenge here are the petabytes of data that are generated daily both from simulation and real-world sensor data. The Autovia Analytics Platform enables large-scale data processing for these use cases. Autovia IO is a data access layer that enables analytics apps to read ROS bags from local and cloud storage. It works for diverse platforms and does not require a ROS installation. Additionally, Autovia FS is a virtual file system with which all applications can read ROS bags from local and cloud storage. Autovia IDE completes the offer: It is an analytic toolbox running as managed service and addresses R&D engineers in automotive and aviation industry.

Christoph Hellmann Santos closed the second conference day and presented the EU initiative agROBOfood, which aims at bringing ROS to the agro-food sector. This domain will have to cope with major changes like ageing population and less working population, climate change, less productiveness of ecological food… New methods like vertical or urban farming and the key topic sustainability are on the rise. Already now, we see quite many robot platforms on the fields that might help mastering these changes. In this context, agROBOfood has three offers: Firstly, ROS will be pushed to use it in agricultural applications. Main topics are functional safety for mobile agricultural robots, software architecture and development and organizational structures like working sponsors and adding groups. Second, the project addresses SMEs with an open call for funding ROS software developments. Third, service providers can join the agROBOfood network and benefit from access to technology maps, market knowledge, and standardization activities. Finally, they can get in contact with people from all areas of agrofood robotics.

In the evening of this conference day, the social dinner took place in the restaurant “Leonhardts” in direct neighborhood to Stuttgart’s iconic TV tower. For some more impressions of the whole event please watch the event video.

This was ROS-Industrial Conference #RICEU2019 (Day 1)

ROS-Industrial Conference 2019

December 10-12, 2019

Seven years after the very first public event entirely devoted to discussing the potential benefits of a shared, open-source framework for industrial robotics and automation, Fraunhofer IPA hosted the 7th edition of the ROS-Industrial Conference on December 10 to 12, 2019.

This is the first instalment of a series of three consecutive blog posts, presenting content and discussions according to the event days including the follwing sessions:

1. Day 1 with “EU ROS Updates” (watch all talks of Day 1 in this YouTube playlist)

2. Day 2 with “Software and System Integration” & “Robotics meets IT”

3. Day 3 with “Hardware and Application highlights” & “Platforms and Community”

Day 1: Updates from ongoing activities in the EU

Already for the seventh time, Fraunhofer IPA invited to a big ROS-Industrial-Event. Meanwhile, the conference – for several years now scheduled shortly before the Christmas break – has established itself as the European event on the topic of ROS, where developers, researchers, companies and all interested parties can learn about the current status of the free Robot Operating System ROS and have the chance to network and exchange information. Last December, some 150 participants came to Stuttgart and benefited from around 40 presentations from academia and industry.

The first day was dedicated to "EU Updates". There is a lot to report here because extensive national and EU funding is flowing into research projects that directly serve further developments of ROS and, in particular, work towards industrial suitability. The projects cooperate closely with the existing community and are strongly networked with each other because they pursue a common goal despite their different approaches: the creation of an EU Digital Industrial Platform for Robotics.

The lectures started with an opening by Thilo Zimmermann, Manager of the ROS Industrial Consortium Europe, as well as by Christoph Hellmann Santos, Group Leader at Fraunhofer IPA, and Werner Kraus, Head of the department Robot and Assistive Systems, also at Fraunhofer IPA. Kraus gave an overview of the current robotics market and presented growing market figures from the statistics of the "International Federation of Robotics" on both industrial and service robotics. The latter in particular often relies on ROS, because with utilizing existing open source software like ROS, the first prototypes can be created much quicker without having to reinvent the wheel and expend too many own resources.

Werner Kraus, head of department of robotics and assistive systems at Fraunhofer IPA

Updates on EU project ROSIN

The largest funding project for ROS is currently ROSIN, which will come to an end in December 2020. First, Carlos Hernandez Corbato from TU Delft gave an introduction to the project, which has two objectives: 1) assuring the availability of high-quality robot software tools and components, and 2) creating a sufficiently large European user- and developer base. To this end, the project is particularly active in three areas: quality assurance of software development and components, continuing education for students and professionals, and financial support for ROS components in the context of "focused technical projects" (FTPs). In more than 50 FTPs, more than three million Euros of funding have already been granted.

In order to improve software quality, ROSIN continues to develop technologies and methods like continuous integration, model-driven development and model-in-the-loop, automated test generation and code scanning. In this context, Andrzej Wasowski presented the topic "[Reactive] Programming with [Rx]ROS". Reactive programming raises the abstraction level comparing to the standard ROS API, by making the flow of information explicitly stand out in the source code.

As far as further education measures are concerned, 530 students and 436 professionals have already been trained in ROS-I schools and ROS-I academies, as Stephan Kallweit from FH Aachen reported. The project goal of 1000 participants has thus already been almost reached and ROSIN has been very successful as a multiplier of ROS knowledge. In addition, in "educational projects" (EPs), formats such as web-based interactive tutorials, ROS training centers or applied training events by 3rd parties are financially supported. The last project year is to be used in particular to create ROS2 training content.

Carlos Hernandez Corbato, professor at TU Delft and coordinator of EU project ROSIN

Insights in „Focused Technical Projects“

As mentioned above, ROSIN has already promoted more than 50 FTPs addressing specific industry needs. Possible FTP contents were algorithms, e.g. a SLAM algorithm, application templates, improvement of existing components, process-related work, e.g. code security audits, improvement of documentation or the integration with other software frameworks. Five FTPs presented their work at the conference:

• Rafael Arrais from the research institute INESCTEC talked about „ROBIN: The ROS-CODESYS Bridge“. It focusses on developing and releasing a bidirectional, reliable and structured communication bridge between ROS and CODESYS, a softPLC that can run on embedded devices and that supports a variety of fieldbuses, and even OPC UA. The developed software will allow the parametrization of ROS modules through IEC61131-3 programming languages and also streamline the interoperability between ROS and robotic hardware or automation equipment, fully empowering the Industry 4.0 paradigm of Plug’n’Produce.

• The Norwegian company PPM, represented by Trygve Thommesen, developed BLACKBOX, an automated trigger-based reporting, data recording and playback unit, collecting data from robot and manufacturing systems. It takes error reporting and recovery of industrial robot systems to a new level, by developing and utilizing the innovative ROS based framework. The framework is built upon components from the project partner’s previous research and existing ROS modules.

• The Spanish CATEC worked on a robust and reliable GPS-free localization algorithm for aerial robots applied to industrial applications. As Paloma Carrasco told, it focuses on safety and computational efficiency. This ROS library helps to foster the development of drone-based solutions for industrial inspections.

• Olivier Michel, CEO at Cyberbotics, presented cross-platform ROS simulation for mobile manipulators. This FTP aims at developing a simulation framework for training pilots of robots used for intervention in case of a nuclear incident. These robots include industrial arms and will be controlled using ROS. The project will contribute to the ROS-Industrial community with a new open-source, cross-platform, high-performance simulator compatible with ROS for industrial robots.

• Finally, Luca Muratore from IIT in Italy talked about ROS End-Effector. It provides a ROS-based set of standard interfaces to command robotics end-effectors in an agnostic fashion. Nowadays, end-effectors are controlled using customized software wrappers and specific frameworks: ROS End-Effectors aims to design and implement a universal ROS package capable to communicate with different end-effectors. The project will be ROS2 compatible and will work both in simulation (Gazebo environment) and in the real hardware.

The session ended with a lecture by Olivier Stasse, LAAS-CNRS. He reported on the use of ROS in robots that are to be used for partial automation in aircraft construction. This domain requires lightweight, safe, mobile, and versatile manufacturing cells that enable human-robot collaboration. Stasse is developing this within the framework of the “Rob4Fam” lab (Robots For the Future of Aircraft Manufacturing). Implemented technologies are real-time/interactive planning, torque control, SLAM algorithm and balance so that robots could climb stairs, screw, or drill. All will be ROS controlled. Also, ROS facilitates the integration between lab and industry.

More projects boosting ROS

Besides the research project ROSIN, there are other national or European research efforts building on or improving ROS components. One of them is the EU project RobMoSys, represented at the conference by Dennis Stampfer from Ulm University of Applied Science. It aims at developing composable models and software for robotic systems and uses a model-driven engineering approach as key enabler for complex software and system integration and for integrating existing technologies. A key component is MROS: Metracontrol for ROS2 systems, a RobMoSys-integrated technical project. Carlos Hernandez Corbato from TU Delft talked about this project that enables models@runtime to drive and architectural adaption for reliable autonomy.

On the national level, there is the German project “Service Robotic Network” (SeRoNet) that aims at building a community-driven platform for a more efficient development of service robots. With the technology behind, the design, development, and deployment of service robots in a variety of areas, from logistics, care, and healthcare to assembly support in manufacturing operations shall be made much easier than today. Through the online platform “robot.one“, users, system integrators and component manufacturers of service robot solutions will be able to collaborate efficiently and jointly support solutions from requirements analysis to deployment. In 2020, two open calls offer funding opportunities: The first call, open until late March, adresses companies that aim to make their software or hardware components compatible to the SeRoNet platform. The second call, in summer 2020, addresses end users and system integrators to propose and implement novel service robot solutions using SeRoNet technology.

Last but not least there is the project RoboPORT. Within this project, an online development platform for service robotics with an extensive library of open source robotics hardware is being created. New collaborative processes such as open innovation, crowd engineering and similar methods will be mapped on the platform to support a continuous and distributed development process. Also, the project supports ideation processes, hackathons and makeathons and offers a network of highly motivated domain experts that help realizing specific project ideas.

ROS is leaving shop floors

The EU activities around ROS are not only focused on the use of free software in production environments. The presentation by Gonzalo Casas from ETH Zurich showed how ROS can be used for architecture and digital fabrication in the construction industry. For example, a robot can use the path planning software MoveIt to build a wall with bricks.

Gonzalo Casas of ETH Zurich presented how ROS for architecture and digital fabrication in the construction industry

Finally, it is the agricultural and food sector where robotic applications are increasingly in demand, including those using ROS. Fraunhofer IPA is also very active in this area, for example in the lead project at Fraunhofer "Cognitive Agriculture" (COGNAC) for sustainable and at the same time profitable agriculture. At EU level, the agROBOfood project is currently gaining momentum with the aim of building the European ecosystem for the effective adoption of robotics technologies in the European agrifood sector. These agricultural activities are not the first ones related to ROS. As Andreas Linz from Hochschule Osnabrück presented, there were projects like BoniRob and elwoRob that already built on ROS. The advantages are manifold: ROS is modular, expandable, reusable, has a huge and active Community and offers over 3000 nodes for nearly all use cases and a large collection of helpful tools, i.e. Rviz. Also, many companies provide ROS compatible drivers and software tools for their hardware, and the integration with other open source libraries like PCL (Point Cloud Library), OpenCV or Gazebo is possible.

The BoniRob system is a modular Robot Platform for agricultural applications using an app concept. Depending on the task, different hardware and software modules can be installed. So far, there is a phenotyping app and a soil2data app measuring the nutrients in the soil. Furthermore, there is the robot elWobot for maintenance in orchards and vineyards and there are robots for education and demonstration. For all these, ROS plays a crucial role.

The first conference day ended with a welcome reception and several ROS demonstrators at the Stuttgart research campus “ARENA2036” for future car manufacturing.

For some more impressions of the whole event please watch the event video.

RIC- Europe Event Recap (Part 2): ROS-Industrial Training and Conference 2016

Note: Part 1 of the RIC-Europe Event Recap covered the ROS-Industrial training and was posted last week and can be found below.

This year’s ROS-Industrial Conference was upgraded, and held over two days with 21 talks, more than doubling last year's ten talks. Brian Gerkey from the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) and formerly of Willow Garage, where ROS was born, gave the first keynote which talked about the origins and recent and upcoming developments of ROS. He gave also an overview about the development and current status of the community and presented a variety of industrial use cases using open source software. Prof. Michael Beetz, an authority in the field of cognitive robotics, delivered the second keynote. His presentation dealt with the very important topic of digital infrastructure to empower service robots with a shared and open knowledge base, as market and technology developments foresee different robots in different environments performing different tasks. The presented platform openEase is possibly the most advanced open-source platform for a web-based knowledge service allowing for collection, storage and inspection of activity data for robot and human tasks.

Dr. Brian Gerkey opened the ROS-Industrial Conference with a keynote about the origins of ROS and recent developments.

Next up, companies ZenRobotics, PAL Robotics and next47 (a Siemens company), gave an overview about how ROS powers their business, or, in the case of next47, is seen as a common trait for up-and-coming robotics startups. After that, the participants got an overview of the most interesting technical developments going on in ROS and ROS-Industrial. Some of the works were presented recently at ROSCon and IROS in South Korea less than a month before, and we were glad to update our audience on such recent content. Part of the technical talks were:

• A presentation of the service robot Care-O-bot from Fraunhofer IPA, held by Dr. Ulrich Reiser
• A case-study on the ROS navigation stack and about deterministic timing for ROS, presented by Ingo Lütkebohle from BOSCH Corporate Research
• Matthias Gruhler from Fraunhofer IPA presented a solution to improve the navigation of industrial service robot fleets using cloud computing
• A status update about ROS 2.0 and about OPC UA was given by Matthias Keinert from University of Stuttgart The first conference day came to an end with insights into Team Delft’s technologies enabling their win of the Amazon Picking Challenge. Last but not least, Martin Hägele, head of department robot and assistive systems at Fraunhofer IPA, gave a detailed overview about ongoing developments in the worldwide robotics market. His talk covered both industrial and service robots and presented data which is collected annually by the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) and published in the “World Robotics Report.”

Prof. Michael Beetz presented the second day's keynote.

Prof. Martijn Wisse from TU Delft opened the second conference day and described a new funding strategy for ROS-Industrial focused Technical Projects set to start in 2017. Further technical talks complemented the morning session with the following content:

• Bernard Dieber from Johanneum Research talked about application-level security for ROS-based applications
• Real-Time Extension to ROS was the topic of the presentation from Jan Carstensen, working at Leibniz Universität Hannover
• A framework for quality assessment of ROS applications was presented by André Santos from INES TEC

For the ROS-Industrial consortia it is important to offer not only technical knowledge during the events but also to transfer knowledge about non-technical but highly relevant topics such as “best practices” related to open-source software and ROS. One example is the question of how to deal with safety regulations when using ROS. Theo Jacobs from Fraunhofer IPA presented some “do’s and don’ts’” with respect to safe software and to the development and application of ROS components. He gave some information about the ISO standardization committees and their procedures for establishing standards. Carsten Emde from the Open Source Automation Development Lab gave insights into open source in industrial automation, which is in fact already a reality in this business domain. He spoke about Linux and some well-known and also less well-known hurdles for its use in automation and how they are or will soon be taken, such as SIL2 certification for base components of a Linux RTOS, currently undergoing at OSADL.

Dr. Catharina Maracke from the Software Compliance Academy held the last non-technical talk about “Unterstanding License Compatibility and Compliance Risks and Processes in Free Open Source Software”. She informed, among others, about different types of licenses, their advantages and constraints and the OpenChain project that aims to address free and open source software-related friction points in the software supply chain. It was the second talk Dr. Maracke gave for the ROS-Industrial consortia, marking a continued collaboration given the interest expressed by our community in these topics. Both Fraunhofer IPA and the RIC-EU consortium are specifically concerned to keep the attention high on these matters as they often represent the reasons why open source software has still some difficulties to be widely adopted within the more conservative industrial automation environment.

Get-together during the breaks

Before the conference wrapped up, the following topics were presented in a last technical track:

• Sebastian Brunner from German Aerospace Center (DLR) spoke about RAFCON, a graphical tool for task programming
• Ontology-driven tools for robot application development were the aim of the ReApp project that was presented by Dr. Björn Kahl from Fraunhofer IPA
• Pablo Quiles Velilla ended the track with his presentation about drag&bot, an innovative and easy way for industrial robot programming

All in all, the ROS-Industrial training and conference offered extensive technical and non-technical knowledge, a variety of best practices and was also a good opportunity to get in contact with the ROS and ROS-Industrial communities and to widen the network. Thanks again to the colleagues from FH Aachen, to all speakers and of course to all participants of the event(s)!

For your reference, the detailed agenda of the whole event as well as all slides from the speakers can be found here. A picture gallery from the training as well as from the conference is available here. Please have in mind: The follow-up event in 2017 will be the ROS-Industrial Summit at RoboBusiness Europe 2017 on April 20-21 in Delft, the Netherlands. The next ROS-Industrial conference is planned for the first half of December 2017.

RIC- Europe Event Recap (Part 1): ROS-Industrial Training and Conference 2016

Note: Part 2 of the RIC-Europe Event Recap will cover topics and presentations presented at the conference. This article will be posted next week.

We had a full house at this year’s event combining ROS-Industrial training, managed by our colleagues from FH Aachen with guest lectures from representatives of PPM AS and IT+Robotics srl, and the ROS-Industrial Conference. From November 2 to November 4, Fraunhofer IPA, the managing organization of the ROS-Industrial Consortium Europe, hosted the event in Stuttgart with in total about 70 participants during the three days. The training and conference were combined and showcased updated formats. For participants, it was easier to attend both activities to get the most out of their visit.

For the training session, we collaborated with our new Consortium member FH Aachen. Thanks to Josef Schleupen who coordinated with his colleagues Harshavardhan Deshpande, Heiko Engemann, Jannik Hoppe and Patrick Wiesen, this event was very successful, especially in providing hands-on sessions for all participants. We covered the main aspects of ROS in one day by giving an introduction into ROS and ROS-Industrial, an overview about ROS-powered robotics and the community. During the first day, FH Aachen tutors presented and tutored the participants in hands-on sessions, performed in pairs, on the usual topics of perception (sensor technologies, image processing and ROS visualization), localization (transformation, mapping & navigation) and manipulation (unified robot description, path-planning with MoveIt!, Gazebo Simulator). During the morning of the second day, some ROS-I specific packages were presented by PPMS AS and IT+Robotics srl. During the training, attendees had the chance to get a condensed overview of what ROS can do for them, to see three different robot arms in action, and use an ad-hoc developed mobile platform.

Some impressions from the ROS-Industrial training: