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Over the past few weeks I've been using MoveIt quite a bit -- I was actually using the Pick and Place actions for Maxwell's chess playing last weekend at Maker Faire (an updated on that shortly).

I recently changed over to using IKFast for IK under MoveIt. This fixes a number of problems with the default IK plugin. I'm using ROS Groovy under Ubuntu Precise, and ran into several issues which I thought I would mention here.

First off, I start with the excellent moveit_ikfast_generator from Dave Coleman. You should run his instructions for "Create Collada File for Use with OpenRave". Once you have a collada file, here is what I did to make the ikfast generator work:

      sudo apt-add-repository ppa:openrave/release
      sudo apt-get update
      sudo apt-get install openrave0.8-dp-ikfast

At this point, I had to edit a /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/openravepy/__init__.py to add the following line just after the copyright:

      __openravepy_version__ = "0.8"

Without this, nothing seems to run. Once the code is updated, the tools listed in section 5 of the ROS Industrial tutorial work as indicated.

Then it's back to the README in moveit_ikfast_generator, where the instructions will walk you through generating the ikfast plugin. One note there is also a command for:

    openrave-robot.py my_robot.dae --info joints

which is very helpful if you have a 7-dof actuator and need to fill in the --freeindex parameter.

I'd like to take one quick moment to thank Dave and the ROS Industrial team for their documentation, and Ioan Sucan and the rest of the MoveIt team for the great platform they've provided.

ROS Industrial has been going for a full year now. Here is a compilation of ROS-Industrial application videos from the first year of the ROS-I repository. See http://ROSindustrial.org and http://consortium.ROSindustrial.org for more info:

ROS-Industrial 1-Yr. Montage Video

From Melonee Wise via ros-users@

Hi Everyone,

From Russell Toris via ros-users@

Dear Robotics and JavaScript Communities-

It is our pleasure to announce the official launch of the Robot Web Tools organization. Robot Web Tools is a collection of open-source modules and tools for building web-based robot apps.

A variety of routes are available for architecting a robot web application. A common route is building web technologies on an existing robot framework. The Robot Operating System (ROS) is one of the top frameworks to program robots and can run on a variety of robots, from a TurtleBot to a PR2 to an Arduino connected to a computer. ROS - and other robot middleware frameworks - provide common robot functionality, including drivers for interfacing with a variety of sensors and actuators and algorithms for navigation, perception, and manipulation.

While ROS works great for applications on the robot, another layer is needed to connect external devices and applications. rosbridge is both a JSON spec for interacting with ROS and a transport layer, providing a WebSocket for clients to communicate over. In the browser layer sits the core JavaScript libraries: roslibjs, ros2js, and ros3djs. These libraries communicate with ROS on the robot over rosbridge's WebSocket server. It's a lightweight, evented library that provides a convenient abstraction to core ROS functionality.

Robot Web Tools is being spearheaded by five supporting organizations: Brown University, Robert Bosch LLC, Willow Garage Inc., Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and Yujin Robot.

The real benefits of the Robot Web Tools organization is JavaScript modules and tools that build off these foundations. With this new effort, we have provided a new website, ample documentation, a new email list, and a collection of tutorials and live demos. We encourage robot and web programmers of all levels to get involved with the community, contribute their projects, and help to grow this emerging technology.

For more information, check us out on our homepage, http://robotwebtools.org/, or see our current projects listed at http://robotwebtools.org/<wbr>tools.html. Links to tutorials and wiki documentation can be found in repository READMEs located at https://github.com/<wbr>robotwebtools.

To keep up to date, be sure to subscribe to our Google Group email list at https://groups.google.com/<wbr>forum/?fromgroups#!forum/<wbr>robot-web-tools (robot-web-tools@googlegroups.<wbr>com)

-- Russell Toris, Community Manager & The Robot Web Tools Team

From Sachin Chitta via ros-users@

Willow Garage is proud to announce the initial release of MoveIt! : new software targeted at allowing you to build advanced applications integrating motion planning, kinematics, collision checking with grasping, manipulation, navigation, perception, and control. MoveIt! is robot agnostic software that can be quickly set up with your robot if a URDF representation of the robot is available. The MoveIt! Setup Assistant lets you configure MoveIt! for any robot, allowing you to visualize and interact with the robot model quickly.

MoveIt! can incorporate both actual sensor data and simulated models to build an environment representation. Sensor information (3D) can be automatically integrated realtime in the representation of the world that MoveIt! maintains. CAD models can also be imported in the same world representation if desired. Collision-free motion planning, execution and monitoring are core capabilities that MoveIt! provides for any robot. MoveIt! updates its representation of the environment on the fly, enabling reactive motion planning and execution, which is essential for applications in human-robot collaborative environments.

MoveIt! interfaces with controllers through a standard ROS interface, allowing for ease of inter-operability, i.e. the ability to use the same higher-level software with a variety of robots without needing to change code. MoveIt! is architected to be flexible, using a plugin architecture to allow users to integrate their own custom components while still providing out-of-the-box functionality using default implementations. Furthermore, the ROS communication and configuration layer of MoveIt! is separated from core computational components such as motion planning or collision checking, the latter components being provided separately as C++ libraries.

Workspace analysis tools allow robot designers to test out the capabilities of their robot designs before building the hardware, using environment and object specific task specifications to quantify the workspace characteristics of different designs. This reduces costly mistakes and iterations in the design stage. We are actively working on completing the pick and place capabilities in MoveIt!, integrating with object recognition, perception, and grasping to allow manipulators to execute generalized pick and place actions.

Get MoveIt!

More Information about MoveIt!, including instructions on how to get and use it, can be found on the MoveIt! website. MoveIt! is currently an alpha release.

Acknowledgements

Willow Garage gratefully acknowledges the contributions of the following people to MoveIt! and associated packages that MoveIt! uses and depends on:

• Lydia Kavraki, Mark Moll, and associated members of the Kavraki Lab (Rice University) for developing OMPL - a suite of randomized planners that MoveIt! uses extensively.
• Dinesh Manocha and Jia Pan of UNC Chapel Hill for developing FCL - a package of collision checking algorithm used extensively by MoveIt!
• Maxim Likhachev (CMU), Ben Cohen (Penn) and Mike Phillips (CMU) for developing SBPL, a search-based planning library integrated with MoveIt!
• Armin Hornung, Kai Wurm, Maren Bennewitz, Cyril Stachniss, and Wolfram Burgard for developing Octomap - software for 3D occupancy mapping used by MoveIt!
• Mrinal Kalakrishnan, Peter Pastor and Stefan Schaal at USC for developing STOMP, the distance field components in MoveIt! and the implementation of the CHOMP algorithm in Arm Navigation
• Dave Coleman from the University of Colorado, Boulder for developing the MoveIt! Setup Assistant and adding documentation to the MoveIt! website.

MoveIt! evolved from the Arm Navigation and Grasping Pipeline components of ROS and we gratefully acknowledge the seminal contributions of all developers and researchers to those packages, especially Edward Gil Jones, Matei Ciocarlie, Kaijen Hsiao, Adam Leeper, and Ken Anderson.

We also acknowledge the contributions of the Willow Garage interns who have worked on MoveIt!, Arm Navigation and associated components, members of the ROS and PR2 communities who have used, provided feedback and provided contributions to MoveIt! and Arm Navigation and members of the ROS community for developing the infrastructure that MoveIt! builds on.

We also acknowledge the contributions of the ROS-Industrial consortium led by the Southwest Research Institute for supporting and building up infrastructure for applying MoveIt! and Arm Navigation to industrial robots and environments. Similarly, we acknowledge the contributions of Fraunhofer IPA to MoveIt! and support for the ROS-Industrial effort in Europe.

For more information visit moveit.ros.org

From Dan Lazewatsky via ros-users@

The Personal Robotics Lab in the School of Mechanical, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at Oregon State University is proud to announce our repository, orst-ros-pkg. Our current released stacks and packages are:

The Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) will participate in the upcoming ROS-Industrial Training Class, June 4-6 (rosindustrial.org/ric/events). OSRF will provide training for the new features and capabilities of the ROS Groovy release, particularly focusing on Catkin, the new software build system. OSRF will be available to respond to questions you may have about the ROS core, past, present, and future.  The class will provide a hands-on introduction to ROS and ROS-Industrial, and it will culminate with hardware integration exercises with live industrial robots and peripherals. The class is FREE to Full/Associate Members of the ROS-Industrial Consortium. Others may attend for a fee.

Please note that class registration is only open until May 18th. We also encourage attendees to buy a small form factor PC to take home after the class. The PC will have Ubuntu, ROS, and ROS-I preinstalled, allowing developers to hit the ground running with ROS-I development.  We are selling the PCs at cost; the first ten buyers will receive them at the sale price that we negotiated. Later units are subject to price change.

I was recently updating my personal website when I realized that I had some projects that had never seen the light of day. This post is about one of these old projects that I never showed off:

Event Title: ROS-Industrial Basic Developer's Class June 4-6, 2013

 

Event Description: We are delighted to invite you to attend the ROS-Industrial Basic Developer's Training class, which will be held June 4-6, at Southwest Research Institute, in San Antonio, TX. The class will provide a hands-on introduction to ROS and ROS-Industrial, and it will culminate with hardware integration exercises with live industrial robots and peripherals. The class is FREE to Full/Associate Members of the ROS-Industrial Consortium. Others may attend for a fee. For your convenience, we are also offering for you to purchase the preconfigured small form factor ROS-I PC that you will use during the class. To learn more about the class, please browse to the website: http://rosindustrial.org/ric/<wbr>events.htm

We are delighted to invite you to attend the ROS-Industrial Basic Developer’s Training class, which will be held June 4-6, in San Antonio, TX. The class will provide a hands-on introduction to ROS and ROS-Industrial, and it will culminate with hardware integration exercises with live industrial robots and peripherals. The class is FREE to Full/Associate Members of the ROS-Industrial Consortium. Others may attend for a fee. For your convenience, we are also offering for you to purchase the preconfigured small form factor ROS-I PC that you will use during the class (pic below). To learn more about the class, please browse to the website.

ROS has recently introduced a new buildsystem, called catkin, which is a replacement for rosbuild. One of the greatest strengths of this new buildsystem is that it is pure CMake, which makes it highly portable, standard, and awesome. However, one of the biggest weakenesses of this new buildsystem is... well, it's entirely CMake, so it is a steep learning curve at times, and easily ridden with bugs.

In typical ROS fashion, there are a number of tutorials on catkin (http://ros.org/wiki/catkin/Tutorials). However, there really is a ton of info that is hard to compress into a small set of tutorials.

The rising tide

You'll often hear the term "wet" and "dry" for catkin versus rosbuild. The important take away here is that it is indeed a rising water level. In other words, "wet" (catkin) packages cannot depend on "dry" stuff. This means you have to wait (or jump in and help) on any rosbuild package that you depend on. The quickest way to see what is catkinized is to look at http://ros.org/debbuild/groovy.html. If it says wet, all good. If something is listed as dry there, it may still be catkinized in preparation for hydro, but only the dry version went into groovy, so check the source repo for a hydro-devel branch or similar.

How is the workflow different?

Catkin moves ROS towards a more standard Filesystem Hierarchy System (FHS) as detailed in REP 122 as well as introducing out-of-source builds and install targets. Understanding this FHS is key to proper catkin package design, especially the install step.

How is a catkin package different from a rosmake one?

In rosmake, we had packages and stacks. In catkin, there are only packages. New catkin packages have a package.xml instead of a manifest.xml and there are a number of changes to the set of available tags. Especially different is that dependencies are all now of one time (no longer are packages/stacks/rosdeps treated differently), but also you specify whether dependencies are needed at build or run time. So what about stacks? Well, they were really nothing more than a nice way to group a series of packages together. In catkin, this is handled by a metapackage. A metapackage has only a package.xml, with rundepends tags for each package in the old stack. Details of catkin's pacakge.xml can be found on http://ros.org/wiki/catkin/package.xml.

In addition to package.xml, CMakeLists.txt still exists, but is basically completely different looking. If you are using Python for anything other than rosrunned-scripts, then you will almost need to create a setup.py. There is a migration guide available on the wiki.

Long Live Roslib. Roslib is dead.

I plan to keep adding to this list...

Hi ros-users and bride-users,

I would like to announce the new release of BRIDE for ROS.

In addition to multiple small fixes these are the new features of the 0.2.0 release:

* Graphical creation of System models: Components can now be added graphically to the system model. No xml hacking any more!

* Coordinator development: You can develop state machines in BRIDE now, so called Coordinator Components. They make use of the Capability Components in you system by triggering actionservers or serviceclients. The Coordinator models are code generated into SMACH components and appear as regular components in the system diagram.

* Action support in code generation: ActionServers are now auto-generated. Only the execution_callback has to be implemented in the user code in the corresponding user_code section.

* Standalone compiler: In the bride_compiler package there is a standalone compiler to use the code generation without Eclipse. Code generation can also be triggered by running "make regen" in the terminal for updating after changes in the model.

As the templates are in the separate bride_templates package, it is now easier to recommend changes in the templates and improve them in smaller iterations.

As usual the installation instructions are on the http://www.ros.org/wiki/bride/ wiki page and the updated tutorials are athttp://www.ros.org/wiki/bride/<wbr>Tutorials/. The binary releases are currently in the build pipeline and should be available soon.

Feel free to give feedback directly, by mailing-list or post bugs and feature requests at https://github.com/ipa320/<wbr>bride/issues.

Cross posted from osrfoundation.org

It's National Robotics Week! And apparently, there is just TOO MUCH ROBOTICS for just one standard week, because NRW spans 9 days, and the website lists events pretty much all month.

There are a number of events in the Bay Area. First up is the Robot Block Party at Stanford from 1-6PM on Wednesday -- there are usually a ton of bots around in a somewhat impromptu show and tell. While I don't think I'll be pulling Maxwell out for this event, I'll probably be there for the later part of the event. Oh, and it's FREE.

Also this week is an interesting event by on Thursday at SRI, put on by Xconomy: Robots Remake the Workplace. Including a keynotes speech from Rodney Brooks.

April 19-21, it's RoboGames! Maxwell will be making an appearance there for sure, likely in the Silicon Valley HomeBrew Robotics Club booth.

And finally, Maxwell will battle PR-Lite at MakerFaire 2013. In chess, that is. That's right, I've dusted off the old AAAI Chess code and the PR-Lite guys have been working to adapt it to their robot. I actually ran into some major issues upgrading the chess code to Groovy as many of the PCL nodelets were not ported forward during the catkinization. So, I took this as an opportunity to rewrite the whole board/piece detection pipeline into a single node that is way faster than the old one, taking into account a number of better heuristics.


I'm still working to integrate MoveIt instead of arm_navigation, but the current code is posted now on github.

From John Schulman at UC Berkley via ros-users@

From Tingfan via ROS Users

From Román Navarro García of Robotnik via ROS Users

We're pleased to announce that the ROS project will soon be hosted by Oregon State University's Open Source Lab (OSL) (http://osuosl.org/). The OSL provides services to many open source communities. We are pleased to join the ranks of projects like Drupal and kernel.org. We'd like to thank Willow Garage for providing hosting and infrastructure for the entire ROS community for over 5 years.

We'd also like to thank Lance Albertson, Carlos Jensen, and Bill Smart for welcoming us to the OSL. We look forward to working with Oregon State and the OSL to provide ongoing hosting as well as exploring ways to improve ROS infrastructure for the greater community.

In the coming weeks, we'll migrate the wiki, ROS Answers, and the Ubuntu package repository from Willow Garage to the OSL. We'll announce more detailed plans as they come together and we'll do our best to minimize disruptions during the migration.

As you might imagine, hosting for these critical services, which are heavily used around the world and around the clock, costs money. We need your help! A big thank you to the ROS-Industrial Consortium, which has stepped up to support part of this cost. If your organization can financially support ROS project hosting, please contact us at info@osrfoundation.org.

From Patrick Goebel via ROS Users

Fig.1. PR2 simulation and its rxgraph

Fig.2. ATRV simulation

From Shaun Edwards on ros-users@