October 13, 2024
IEEE Robotics and Automation Practice (RA-P)

IEEE Robotics and Automation Practice (RA-P) is on live.

Robotics and Automation Practice (RA-P) seeks to publish research explicitly directed toward practitioner’s interests and concerns, with results deployed in actual robotics and automation settings immediately or in the near-term.

As a one of the editorial board members, I am really excited to look forward to seeing a lot of technical papers, applications, systems for robotics in the real-world practice from ROS Community :rocket: :rocket: :rocket:

IEEE RAS RA-P flyer.pdf (870.4 KB)

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by tomoyafujita on October 13, 2024 08:07 PM

October 11, 2024
ROS News for the Week of October 7th, 2024

ROS News for the Week of October 7th, 2024



ROSCon 2024 is officially sold out! We can’t wait to see all 950 of you in Odense in a little over a week.


For those of you attending ROSCon we still have Birds of a Feather slots open. If you didn’t sign up for a workshop please consider organizing or attending one or more BoF sessions. We also have a few late-breaking unofficial ROSCon events including, an Aerial Robotics Meetup, and a MoveIt Pro Happy Hour.


saildrone
Our friends and colleagues over Sail Drone, working with NOAA, shared some incredible footage from inside Hurricane Milton. More local news coverage on the video


Corvus One: Autonomous Inventory Management System

This week we learned that our colleagues and former neighbors at Open Robotics, Corvus Robotics, have raised an $18M Series A. Congrats to the whole team! More reporting at the The Robot Report



Checkout Plantolin, a bio-inspired robot built as part of the Natural Robotics Contest. I got my start working on a bio-inspired robots, and this competition seems like a great way to get younger kids interested in the field. As for the Plantolin, seed scattering animals are quite effective, and seem to be at work in my yard. They also seem to be commercially viable.

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ROS

Got a Minute? :mantelpiece_clock:

We have :100: issues in the ROS 2 Documentation that could use your help! We really need the community to help pitch in with documentation writing. Just an hour two of contribution would really help. :pray:

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by Katherine_Scott on October 11, 2024 07:02 PM

October 10, 2024
ROSCon Whova Meta-Leaderboard

For anyone who’s starting to participate on the conference app, here are the top contributors from last year! (@Shane_at_PickNik has the top place two years running)

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by rgariepy on October 10, 2024 07:49 PM

What happened to backward_ros?

The backward_ros package is great. It gives you a stack trace when your ros2 application crashes.
We’re on rolling distro and since about a couple of months ago, backward_ros has stopped working. Now all you see is a stack trace with hex addresses.

Is this the experience for others on rolling?

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by thejeeb on October 10, 2024 01:33 PM

October 09, 2024
Wanted examples of ros2_controllers chaining

Hello, I am integrating ros2_controllers to RobotCAD and faced to lack of examples and documentation of chaining ros2_controllers (all of them).

Could you give me links to chained ros2_controllers YAML configs examples or addintion docs? I mean not custom controllers but just chained controllers from ros2_controllers repository.

Screenshot of future feature ros2_controllers in RobotCAD

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by fenixionsoul on October 09, 2024 08:35 PM

October 08, 2024
New Packages for Iron Irwini 2024-10-08

Hello everyone!

We’re happy to announce 1 new package and 119 updates are now available in ROS 2 Iron Irwini :iron: :irwini: .

This sync was tagged as iron/2024-10-08 .

Package Updates for iron

Added Packages [1]:

  • ros-iron-neo-nav2-bringup: 1.1.1-1

Updated Packages [119]:

Removed Packages [0]:

Thanks to all ROS maintainers who make packages available to the ROS community. The above list of packages was made possible by the work of the following maintainers:

  • Adam Serafin
  • Bernd Pfrommer
  • Jose Luis Blanco-Claraco
  • Jose-Luis Blanco-Claraco
  • José Luis Blanco-Claraco
  • Kevin Rösch
  • Lennart Puck
  • Markus Bader
  • Martin Günther
  • Michael Ferguson
  • Miguel Company
  • Pradheep Padmanabhan
  • Southwest Research Institute

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by Yadunund on October 08, 2024 05:32 PM

A New Robotics Company - Henki Robotics

Hi all!

We wanted to announce here that we just launched our company, Henki Robotics Ltd., specializing in robotics software development using ROS 2!

We are Janne and George, two robotics software engineers from Joensuu, Finland. After working for years in robotics, we have seen many organizations all over the world facing similar challenges related to robotics and ROS development. Our goal with Henki Robotics is to help reduce development costs by providing our expertise through consulting and custom code development.

Today we published the first version of our website - check it out to learn more about us and our company. Currently, we are looking for interesting robotics projects where we could assist. Do you have a project where you need technical expertise, or know someone who does? If so, we would be happy to discuss!

www.henkirobotics.com

logo

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by jak on October 08, 2024 11:30 AM

October 04, 2024
ROS News for September 30th, 2024

ROS News for the Week of September 30th, 2024


a0795a6f09133bc351ebab8755ed01fee832c023
:tada: :bank: Gazebo Ionic has been released!



@fmrico has been working on a cool little tool called YAETS (Yet Another Execution Tracing System) that let’s you track node execution order via a Gantt Charts.



Check out this “Great Outdoors Dataset (GOD)”, it is a collection of annotated off-road multi-modal scenes with just about every type of sensor in a ROSBag.


Screenshot from 2024-10-04 13-13-59
Our friends and colleagues over at Dexory have raised an $80M series B to fund expansion to the US market.



:tada: ROSCon tickets are basically sold out! Last I heard, there were two dozen tickets remaining, and that was three days ago. It is now or never.

Events

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ROS

Got a Minute? :mantelpiece_clock:

If you’ve got some extra time please take a minute to answer a couple questions over on Robotics Stack Exchange. Your answers help us build a knowledge base of answers to common ROS questions.

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by Katherine_Scott on October 04, 2024 08:32 PM

End-to-end AI for robotics

Hey ROS folks,

We are yaak.ai, a tiny startup in Berlin focussed on building tools and OSS that enable end-to-end AI for robotics. We just getting started with our open-source effort and would appreciate your feedback on our recent project — rbyte.

With the latest release we’ve added support for building training batches (PyTorch tensordict) directly from rosbags/mcap, without the need to unpack them. A sample NuScenes-v1.0 config is in the repo for you to try out. If there public robotics datasets (rosbags/mcap), which you would like us to support in rbyte, please feel free to open a discussion in gh.

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by harsimrat on October 04, 2024 06:02 PM

October 03, 2024
New Packages for Noetic 2024-10-03

We’re happy to announce 2 new packages and 99 updates are now available in ROS Noetic. This sync was tagged as noetic/2024-10-03.

Thank you to every maintainer and contributor who made these updates available!

Package Updates for ROS Noetic

Added Packages [2]:

Updated Packages [99]:

Removed Packages [0]:

Thanks to all ROS maintainers who make packages available to the ROS community. The above list of packages was made possible by the work of the following maintainers:

  • Adam Serafin
  • Alexander Gutenkunst
  • Atsushi Watanabe
  • Blake Anderson
  • Chittaranjan Srinivas Swaminathan
  • Daisuke Sato
  • Dave Coleman
  • Felix Exner
  • G.A. vd. Hoorn
  • Isaac I. Y. Saito
  • Jon Binney
  • Jose Luis Blanco-Claraco
  • Jose-Luis Blanco-Claraco
  • José Luis Blanco-Claraco
  • Kevin Rösch
  • Marc Alban
  • Markus Bader
  • Martin Pecka
  • Mathias Lüdtke
  • Michael Carroll
  • Michael Ferguson
  • Michael Görner
  • Nikos Koukis
  • Raghavender Sahdev
  • Vladislav Tananaev

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by sloretz on October 03, 2024 11:54 PM

Experiences with ackermann chassis with no steering actuation like segway RMP 401 for autonomous navigation

Hi!

I’m currently undertaking the task of building an indoors-outdoors urban robot and have come across a chassis that has an ackermann architecture but there’s no direct actuation in the steering mechanism, instead it has 4 actuated wheels and the steering angle is controlled by the speed differential of the two front wheels. If the robot were turned off you would be able to manually change the steering angle of the two front wheels without finding any resistance, because there’s no motor there, only a pivot.

An example of this chassis is segway’s RMP 401, which seems to have had some adoption in the industry by companies like Coco and Goggo network.

This chassis seems to have some advantages with respect to 4 and 6 wheeled differential chassis, particularly they seem to provide very smooth and agile motion with minimal vibration when operating within the ackermann kinematic constraints (video), while still allowing for almost zero turn radius operating like a 4 wheeled differential (video).

I’m curious to hear if anyone in the community has experience with this kind of hybrid ackermann-differential chassis, particularly regarding:

  1. The controllability of the steering mechanism, does your chassis have any kind of feedback on the steering angle despite not being actuated? How controllable is this angle?
  2. How much stress is put on the wheels/motors when making near zero radius turns? from the video it seems like there’s quite a bit of wheel slip when operating “outside” what the ackermann kinematics would allow to move as.
  3. Maneuverability: How hard is for the chassis to go through tight spaces, such as doors? how would it do for example going in and out of an elevator? How would it do parking/docking?
  4. Integrability to ROS ecosystem: I don’t think there’s support either for ros2_control or nav2

Thanks in advance for any opinions you can provide!

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by alejandro on October 03, 2024 05:17 PM

7th International Workshop on Robotics Software Engineering

Hey, folks,

We are excited to organize the 7th Edition of the International Workshop on Robotics Software Engineering, co-located at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE '25) in Ottawa, Canada next year (April 27th to May 3rd, 2025).

We would love to see more members of the ROS community get involved, whether that be through submitting a paper on your research, tools, or a case study about software engineering practice, or by participating in the workshop and contributing to the discussion.

If that sounds interesting to you, check out the Call for Papers on the workshop website (RoSE 2025), or feel free to send me a DM or email with any questions! :slight_smile: (e.g., “could I submit a paper on X?”)

Submissions are due on November 11th, 2024. We are interested in contributions addressing, but not limited to, the following topics related to robotics software engineering:

  • Analysis of challenges in robotic software engineering
  • Best practices in engineering robotic software
  • Continuous integration and deployment in robotics
  • Domain-specific languages and tools for the development of robotic software
  • Empirical studies of robotics software and software tools, including its usability
  • Engineering (heterogeneous) multi-robot systems.
  • Identification and analysis of design principles promoting quality of service (e.g., performance, energy efficiency)
  • Lessons learned in the engineering and deployment of large-scale, real-world integrated robot software
  • Machine learning applied to robotic software
  • Metrics measuring non-functional properties (e.g., robustness, availability, etc.) and their application to robotic software
  • Mining software repositories of robotic systems
  • Model-Driven Engineering methods and techniques applied to robotic software
  • Processes and tools supporting the engineering and development of robotic systems
  • Software architecture of robotic systems
  • State-of-the-art research projects, innovative ideas, and field-based studies in robotic software engineering
  • Static and dynamic analysis of robotic software
  • Usability studies of robotics software and tools
  • Variability, modularity, and reusability in robotic software
  • Validation and verification of robotic software

Thank you on behalf of the RoSE '25 organizers!

Chris

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by ChrisTimperley on October 03, 2024 01:07 PM

Archive of approved minutes of the OSRA Technical Governance Committee

I am pleased to announce that the approved minutes of the OSRA Technical Governance Committee are now available publicly.

We are working on a much more complete website for the OSRA, which will include space for meeting minutes, project updates, events, and other useful information. However this is taking longer than planned, so in the interest of making these minutes available to the community we are going to place them in this repository as an interim measure.

New minutes will be added once approved by the TGC. This will happen approximately monthly.

Please be sure to read the README file in the repository before browsing the minutes themselves.

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by gbiggs on October 03, 2024 12:20 AM

October 02, 2024
Needed: ROS2 Node Management Tool

How do you recommend launching a prototype robotics systems on multiple PCs (minimum of an operations computer and a robot computer)? There has been past discussion on this and some great ROS1 tools, but I have yet to see a ROS2 tool that sufficiently fits the bill without also being overly challenging to install and configure (possible exception, perhaps too soon to say).

It feels like this should be a common ROS2 tool, but it appears that the mindset of assigning this design work to roslaunch alone has hampered efforts to make something simple and robust. We are thus left with many bespoke solutions developed by the community for their specific purposes (e.g. docker compose, ansible, systemd, etc.).

From my perspective, rosmon (ROS1) probably got the closest to a must-have reliable tool for remote node management (though I mostly used node manager on projects I was on) and we are in need of some ROS2 equivalent node management tool. Does anyone have insight or recommendations? A few requirements/desirements would be:

  1. Manually start / stop nodes on multiple PCs at any time (perhaps with requirement to start some daemon first)
  2. See status (alive/dead) of each node (or component set)
  3. View individual terminals for each node at any time
  4. View parameters for each node (yes, there are other ways to do this already)
  5. Launch debug sessions (gdb or similar) on any running node (rosmon does this)

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by swan on October 02, 2024 11:32 PM

October 01, 2024
MoveIt Pro 6 Released - Runtime and Developer Platform for ROS 2

We’re excited to announce release MoveIt Pro 6 that further enhances the development platform for ROS 2 applications for robot arms on fixed bases, linear rails, and mobile manipulators.

Key New features:

lab_sim_low_res2

New High Fidelity Physics Simulation Engine

Simulate RGBD cameras, 2D and 3D LiDAR, and most importantly force-torque sensors! The simulator enables a variety of end effectors, including robust 2 finger grippers, vacuum and magnetic grippers, and tools that form rigid attachments, for example welding and nailing. Of particular note, MoveIt Pro’s simulator does not require a dedicated GPU (making it easy to use on any laptop or cloud compute). MoveIt Pro now uses this simulator by default instead of Gazebo.

New Motion Planning with MoveIt Pro RRTConnect

Meet our new joint-space planner, Pro RRTConnect. This planner is deterministic, faster to compute, and generates more efficient paths compared to OMPL planners. Its first release supports both free space and Cartesian path planning, and like all MoveIt planners, is hardware agnostic and collision aware.

Force Compliant Controllers

We have added two real-time controllers for force sensitive tasks: a Joint Trajectory Admittance Controller (JTAC) and a Velocity Force Controller (VFC). The JTAC is great for use cases where object localization is not 100% perfect or when interacting with heavy objects, such as grasping motions and opening doors. The VFC is great for use cases where a particular force needs to be exerted over a trajectory, such as sanding and cutting motions.

Whole Body Manipulation with Clearpath + UR

Whole Body Control for Mobile Manipulators

Mobile manipulators present a great opportunity to both free manipulators from fixed bases and to improve their reachability. If you have a robot arm on a base which has too many constraints, too few degrees of freedom (DOF), or not enough reachability to perform a task, whole body planning will enable the base to move in coordination with the arm to resolve redundancy and increase reachability.

Navigation Support

Control your AMR or AGV with two new MoveIt Pro Behaviors: NavigateToPoseAction and NavigateThroughPosesAction. These send the robot base to one or more poses using Nav2’s Behavior Trees.

Arm-Centric Visualization Improvements

We’ve added more intuitive 3D grid visualization, streamlined objective lists, and more intelligent error messaging. This makes it easier to identify points of failure in MoveIt motion planning and manipulation.

PLC Interaction with an IO Controller

We have added an Input/Output Controller that enables triggering ROS-enabled binary IO devices, such as activating vacuum grippers or communicating with PLCs, via behaviors.

Built on Open Source

MoveIt Pro fully embraces the ROS 2 ecosystem, including its build system, package management, message format, middleware, etc. MoveIt Pro is also built on MoveIt open source, following the common open core business model, providing commercial grade, premium real time controllers, planners, IK solvers, etc. We continue to maintain MoveIt open source and contribute to other key libraries including core ROS 2, ROS 2 Control, RobotWebTools, and more.

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by davetcoleman on October 01, 2024 08:31 PM

Cloud Robotics WG: "Enabling Usable and Reliable Cloud Robotics with FogROS2" - Guest Talk by Kaiyuan Eric Chen

Please come and join us for this coming meeting at 2024-10-07T17:00:00Z UTC2024-10-07T18:00:00Z UTC, where Kaiyuan Eric Chen will be talking about Enabling Usable and Reliable Cloud Robotics with FogROS2.

Eric is a PhD student in the Department of Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley and a member of Berkeley Automation Lab working closely with Ken Goldberg and Jeffrey Ichnowski. He has been leading the work on FogROS2: a state-of-the-art open source cloud robotics framework that offloads unmodified ROS2 applications to the cloud. He will give a talk overarching the different results obtained with the FogROS2 line of research.

Last meeting, we had a guest talk from Florian Pokorny on CloudGripper, An Open Source Cloud Robotics Testbed for Robotic Manipulation Research, Benchmarking and Data Collection at Scale. If you’re interested to see the talk, we have published it on YouTube. The entire meeting recording is also available, but has very little extra video than the guest talk.

If you are willing and able to give a talk on cloud robotics in future meetings, we would be happy to host you - please reply here, message me directly, or sign up using the Guest Speaker Signup Sheet. We will record your talk and host it on Vimeo with our other meeting recordings too!

The meeting link is here, and you can sign up to our calendar or our Google Group for meeting notifications.

Hopefully we will see you there!

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by mikelikesrobots on October 01, 2024 03:45 PM

September 30, 2024
:tada: Gazebo Ionic Has Been Released! [X-Post from Gazebo Sim Community]

Hi Everyone,

The latest version of Gazebo, Gazebo Ionic, has been released! There are a lot of great features in Ionic that should make life a lot easier for ROS users that use Gazebo. Please see the release announcement for full details.

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by Katherine_Scott on September 30, 2024 06:23 PM

Interview for my masters thesis about camera APIs

Hi,

My name is Viktor, I’m currently writing my masters thesis about camera systems (covering topics like sensors, ISPs, APIs, and usages).

I’m currently writing the chapter on the different APIs that exist (Argus, libcamera, genicam, HAL3), as I’ve not really used these to a very large extent, I’d like to interview people who have.

There won’t be that many questions, I hope not to take much of your time. If you’re interested you can find me in the following way (in addition to here):

irc (https://www.oftc.net/) nick: viktorh
email: please message me for email if you’d prefer that
form: https://forms.gle/9XfB8QkNJQTM9WMv8

  • Viktor

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by vikke on September 30, 2024 04:21 PM

September 27, 2024
ROS News for the Week of September 23rd 2024

ROS News for the Week of September 23rd 2024



:stopwatch:This is your final ROSCon 2024 ticket reminder. The last day to purchase regular price ROSCon tickets is Monday 2024-09-30T07:00:00Z UTC. Prices go up after Monday! I believe we have one ROSCon sponsorship slot remaining, if your org would like to snap it up please reach out to us before 2024-10-01T07:00:00Z UTC.




Gazebo Ionic drops on Monday! We’ve released the release illustration and kicked off our swag sale for this release. We’ve also released a 3D model you can download and print at home!



Congratulations to our Japanese colleagues on another successful ROSConJP :bangbang: My understanding is that this was our biggest ROSConJP yet, and I woke up to an absolute storm of amazing social media posts on Tuesday morning.


teleop
Check out this cool demo of using your phone and ROS to do robot teleoperation



Congratulations to our friends at PX4 who released v 1.15 this week! They have a bunch of great new tutorials that are taking a look at.


a7b808b342f7b40b33d159774ee3bed11290f481_2_690x412
@JM_ROS has released some helpful plots from their ROS executor benchmarks that are worth checking out.


The ROSCon India CFP is now live. Submissions are due 2024-10-31T07:00:00Z UTC.

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ROS

Got a Minute? :mantelpiece_clock:

If you learned something new about ROS this week consider sending us a documentation pull request covering what you learned. The ROS Docs are a community effort, and we could really use your help filling in the gaps in our documentation.

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by Katherine_Scott on September 27, 2024 07:49 PM

ROSCon 2024 Denmark Public Transportation

Hi all,

Since this is my 1st time to get to Denmark, I would like to know about public transportation and taxi/ride apps in Denmark, Odense.

I will be landing in Copenhagen international airport, and then what I should take?

  • Google tells me that we can take the train from Copenhagen to Odense? This looks the best option, but do we need to reserve the train or just buy-a-ticket-and-go?
  • Is there any recommended ride/taxi app in Odense? seems that they do not have UBER in Denmark?

any information is appreciated, especially from local people!

thanks,
Tomoya

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by tomoyafujita on September 27, 2024 02:05 AM

September 26, 2024
Servo a Robot Arm Using Your Phone and WebXR! 📱

Hey everyone!

We’ve developed an open-source teleoperation device that lets you control a robot arm using just your phone—no extra hardware or app downloads needed! Just move your phone, and watch the robot gripper mimic your motions in real time.

As part of our imitation learning project, we needed a teleoperation device to enhance our process of gathering demonstrations. We tried keyboard, spacemouse, and freedrive, but it for some use-cases it limited us. This approach utilizes WebXR (specifically ARCore) to fuse RGB and IMU data, allowing us to servo the robot arm in 6 DoF (Degrees of Freedom).

ROS2 Support
The project has built-in support for the ROS 2 cartesian_motion_controller but I guess it should easily adapted for MoveIt Servo.

How It Works?
Python Package: The package starts a web server. Open the web app on your smartphone, and it streams the phone’s position in 3D space (position + orientation). Real-Time Control: We use the phone’s pose data to servo the arm.

We packaged this as an open-source project because we believe it could be valuable to the community.

teleop

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by Marija_Golubovic on September 26, 2024 09:21 PM

Interoperability Interest Group October 03, 2024: The Challenge of Resource Contention in Large-Scale Robot Fleets

Community Page

Meeting Link

Calendar Link

When large fleets of robots need to perform ad hoc tasks that utilize limited resources such as parking spots, (un)loading points, or chargers, operations can get messy if you don’t have a way to resolve conflicts between robots that want to use the same resource at the same time.

At this session of the interoperability special interest group, Arjo Chakravarty will present on the new resource reservation system that is being introduced to Open-RMF. This new system will automatically prevent robots from attempting to use the same resource at the same time, and will also redirect robots to available parking spots where they can wait until the resource that they want becomes available.

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by grey on September 26, 2024 03:38 PM

ROS Medical BoF at ROSCon 2024

After what I’ve heard was a huge turn out last year - we’re back with another in person event!

21st Oct, Room 208, 5pm

And you might see some medical talks on the schedule, too… :eyes:

Gonna be a great ROSCon :tada:

On behalf of the ROS Medical Community Group: see you there!

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by dhood on September 26, 2024 03:20 PM

September 24, 2024
Exporting SolidWorks Design as URDF for ROS

Hello ROS community,

We have created a detailed guide on Exporting SolidWorks Designs as URDF for ROS 1. The documentation starts from installing the URDF export plugin and walks you through each step, covering all the details needed to successfully export your robot model to a URDF file.

You can find the documentation here!

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by khaledgabr77 on September 24, 2024 12:54 PM

Interim policy on the use of generative AI in OSRF projects

There is a desire to use generative AI tools as part of producing contributions to OSRF projects. However, we request that developers please refrain from using generative AI tools (such as Chat-GPT, Gemini, and GitHub Copilot) in submissions to OSRF projects, including ROS 2, Gazebo, and Open-RMF. The OSRA Technical Governance Committee has created a Technical Committee to investigate the potential risks with regard to these tools; this TC plans to release a comprehensive formal policy of the OSRF on contributors’ use of Generative AI by the end of 2024.

If you have comments or feedback on this subject please feel free to discuss them in this ROS Discourse thread and we will consider them, along with other relevant opinions (particularly legal), while developing these guidelines.

If you would like to share feedback privately please message @gbiggs (OSRA TGC chair) and @nuclearsandwich (chair of the Technical Committee on Generative AI) on Discourse.

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by gbiggs on September 24, 2024 03:34 AM


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