Last week, OSRF went to CloudBeat. Hugo was in a panel discussion about the selection of Cloud provider infrastructure. Inspired by the success of the Virtual Robotics Challenge (VRC), OSRF is continuing the development of CloudSim, which allows us to run Gazebo simulations, both on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) virtual cloud and the SoftLayer bare-metal cloud. In parallel, we’re also exploring OpenStack private cloud support, and are looking forward to the advent of GPU virtualization technology and the upcoming cloud gaming industry.

Hugo got a chance to meet with Duke Scarda, CTO of Softlayer, our cloud partner for the VRC, and Mike Miller of Cloudant. Mike was insightful in comparing AWS to the iPhone and OpenStack to Android of a few years ago: the iPhone was certainly the visionary leader and first to market. We should see interesting developments in the coming months as the industry seems to be rallying around OpenStack and SDN (Software Defined Networking)… prompting Amazon and VMWare to reinvent themselves.

Let us know what you’d like the ROS cloud to be like.

The Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) has a clear mission: “To support the development, distribution, and adoption of open source software for use in robotics research, education, and product development.” We have three exciting Google Summer of Code projects contributing to CloudSim, Gazebo, and ROS, which currently represent three of our biggest open source efforts.

Esteve Fernandez has been adding support for OpenStack to CloudSim, a project developed by OSRF to run robotics simulations in the cloud. CloudSim was used to support the DARPA Virtual Robotics Challenge and currently supports the Amazon and SoftLayer clouds. Esteve added support for private clouds to CloudSim, enabling organizations to run simulations on their own networks. Furthermore, Esteve is contributing to CloudSim by fixing bugs, improving the code base and helping with any task that comes up. In the following weeks, he will be making CloudSim constellations accessible to users in an OpenStack cloud provided by OSRF as a public service.

Andrei Haidu is developing a fluid dynamics physics engine for the Gazebo robot simulator that will enable the use of aerial and underwater vehicles in simulation.

Gonzalo Abella is developing a new parameter server prototype for ROS. He is exploring making all parameters dynamic, and integrating the capabilities of the dynamic_reconfigure package into the core API.

Congratulations are in order. OSRF’s own Morgan Quigley was announced today as a recipient of MIT Technology Review’s annual list of 35 top young innovators. For his work in robotics software and electronics, Morgan has been honored as an outstanding inventor on the list.

There are very few individuals in the technology industry with the moniker of ‘The Godfather,’ but Morgan is one of the few. If you search for ‘Godfather of ROS’ you will find links to Morgan’s work, including the opening keynote of the inaugural ROSCon 2012 conference.

“This is a wonderful recognition of Morgan’s contributions to the world of robotics,” said Brian Gerkey, CEO of OSRF. “I’ve said this many times: if you’ve done anything with ROS, you’ve used Morgan’s code.”

Morgan joined OSRF in August 2012 after completing his dissertation defense in the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. While at Stanford, Morgan developed hardware and software systems for personal robots, including the design and initial implementation of ROS in close collaboration with colleagues, including two of whom (Brian Gerkey and Tully Foote) are now at OSRF. On the hardware side, Morgan was the electrical and software designer for the low-cost, highly dexterous hand produced for the 2010-2012 DARPA ARM-H program on a team led by Curt Salisbury of Sandia National Laboratories.

“Over the years, we’ve had success in choosing women and men whose innovations and companies have been profoundly influential on the direction of human affairs,” said editor in chief and publisher Jason Pontin. “Previous winners include Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the cofounders of Google; Mark Zuckerberg, the cofounder of Facebook; Jonathan Ive, the chief designer of Apple; and David Karp, the creator of Tumblr. We’re proud of our selections and the variety of achievements they celebrate, and we’re proud to add Morgan to this prestigious list.”

Morgan and the rest of this year’s honorees are currently featured at technologyreview.com, and in the September/October print magazine, which hits newsstands on September 3. Morgan will also appear in person at the upcoming EmTech MIT conference from October 9-11 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

OSRF is pleased to welcome Heather Boortz as a summer intern! Heather is currently at Olin College, a small engineering school just outside of Boston, working on her BS in Engineering, focusing on computer engineering and robotics. She is excited to be out here working on the CloudSim team.

After much anticipation, the winners of the DARPA Virtual Robotics Challenge (VRC) have been announced! Twenty-six teams from around the world qualified to compete in the VRC. Teams were judged on a number of factors, including the number of points earned in each task, the amount of bandwidth used when communicating with the robot, and the speed at which each task was completed. The results are posted in this DARPA news release . Congratulations to all of the teams that participated for their superb work during this competition!

The VRC was the first of three competitions that make up the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC). Teams were given three main tasks to complete, and had five opportunities to complete each of the three tasks, with slight variations present in each attempt. The three main tasks were as follows: 1) Walk to a utility vehicle, get into the vehicle, drive it along the road and around obstacles, get out of the vehicle, and walk through the final gate. 2) Walk across varying terrain, including mud, over uneven terrain, and through a rubble-strewn field. 3) Walk to a fire hose, pick it up, screw the hose into a pipe, and turn a valve. These sample tasks reflect some of the actions required of rescue workers in disaster response scenarios. DARPA began with this virtual competition because the software to control advanced robots for disaster response is a critical prerequisite to making such robots work in the real world.

At OSRF, we’ve spent the last year building on top of Gazebo to create the DRC Simulator, which was used in the VRC. We have improved many aspects of Gazebo, including the physics models, sensor capabilities, real-time factor, and model accuracy and capabilities. In addition, we made it possible to run simulations in the cloud, making simulation-based work more accessible to folks interested in robotics. We’d like to thank all of the teams for their feedback, contributions, and support during the development phase of the VRC. The work we’ve done on the Simulator is, of course, all open source and available to anyone interested. Over the next few years, we will continue to improve Gazebo and aim to support and facilitate future robotics R&D.

We are not only honored to have been selected by DARPA to work with them on this stage of the DRC, but also proud of the fact that the Simulator will continue to be a resource for robot research and development in the future.

Again, congratulations to the winning teams for their truly impressive efforts and creativity in solving the VRC’s difficult tasks. We’re very excited to see what happens in the next round of the DRC.

For more information, see the DARPA VRC Winners Announcement.

You can see DARPA’s VRC overview video here .

You can also have a look at the VRC driving task, walking task, and firehose manipulation task.

It has been a long and exciting process, and the winners of the Virtual Robotics Challenge are set to be announced tomorrow.

Shortly after the announcement, Gill Pratt from DARPA and Nate Koenig from OSRF will host a Reddit chat where you have the opportunity to pose your own questions about the VRC, the current state of robotics, the ongoing role of the Simulator, and (almost) anything else.

We will start taking questions for the Reddit chat at 12:30 p.m. EST tomorrow, June 27, and answer questions from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. EST.

More details on how to access the Reddit chat will be published on our blog tomorrow, and also via @OSRFoundation and @DARPA

UPDATE: Check out the AMA here.

After 74 exciting and grueling hours of staffing the OSRF office around the clock, the Virtual Robotics Challenge (VRC) is finished! The first teams began competing in Japan last Monday afternoon PDT, and the final competition task was completed shortly after 6 pm last Thursday PDT. Over the course of those three days, we saw many creative and impressive solutions to the difficult VRC tasks.

We’re excited to see the final results this coming Thursday, June 27. Stay tuned to find out which teams won an ATLAS robot!

For more information, visit http://theroboticschallenge.org .

OSRF is pleased to welcome Dave Coleman as a summer intern! Dave is a PhD student at the University of Colorado Boulder under Prof. Nikolaus Correll. His research interests include motion planning, grasping and perception. Dave is a strong believer in the community-driven open source ROS project and is happy to be returning to OSRF after his last summer’s internship at Willow Garage.

As of Monday at 4 pm local time, the Virtual Robotics Challenge (VRC) is underway! The VRC is the first of three competitions that make up the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC), and up to six winning teams will be awarded an ATLAS robot, along with additional funding. We’ve been working hard in the months leading up to the VRC, and are excited as teams begin competing across the world. Stay tuned because the VRC winners will be announced on June 27!

For more information, visit http://theroboticschallenge.org .

The week of June 3rd, 2013, William visited SwRI to help teach the first ROS-Industrial Training Class. Check out some photos of the event at the ROS-I blog!

We’re happy to announce that we’ve posted videos of the ROSCon 2013 talks, along with speakers’ slides. They’re linked from the program page. Clear your calendar; that’s over 16 hours of ROSCon content.

Slides and/or video are missing for a few of the talks. They’ll trickle in over time. We’re also expecting to get photos from the official photographer soon. In the meantime, attendee photos are coming together on G+.

The final registration count was 288, up 37% from 2012. Thanks again to everybody for coming! And thanks to our sponsors, without whom we couldn’t put on such an event.

OSRF is pleased to welcome Ben Charrow! Ben is a PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania advised by Prof. Vijay Kumar and Prof. Nathan Michael. His research focuses on how to enable teams of robots to gather information about the world around them. Ben is a big believer in the power of ROS. He even used it to build a tele-operated robotic ring bearer for his wedding. At OSRF he hopes to improve ROS support for multi-robot systems.

The Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) will participate in the upcoming ROS-Industrial Training Class, June 4-6. 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.

As the Lead User Experience (UX) Designer at OSRF, I’m very excited to see more users contributing their time and effort to improving the ROS and Gazebo software. As these communities continue to grow, it becomes even more important to consider the usability of ROS and Gazebo, along with the related documentation. By designing user-friendly software and support documents, we make our work more accessible to the broader robotics community, and encourage more novice users to hop on the ROS/Gazebo bandwagon. Addressing usability in our work and designing with our users’ best interests at heart becomes even more critical as society as a whole begins interacting more with robots. Robots and robot software no longer exist exclusively in research labs. They’re working next to people in manufacturing environments, enabling people with paralysis to walk , and helping educate children in schools . Robots are becoming ubiquitous, and as this happens, our work on ROS and Gazebo helps shape the future of robotics and the integration of robots into everyday life. By identifying and designing for our users’ needs, we help advance the state of robotics by making robots more useful, usable and enjoyable to use.

At OSRF, I conduct as many usability testing sessions as we can manage given our project timelines. While we would always benefit from more, the testing we do have time for yields excellent feedback that helps us produce new features with more usable layout, interactions and functionality. While it certainly helps to have a UX Designer such as myself on the payroll, anyone can do usability testing. To encourage all of you, I’ve added a Usability Resources page to our wiki. There, you’ll find information on usability studies, heuristic evaluation, hand-drawn prototypes, and more. Have a look around and give the methods a shot.

There are a lot of awesome robots and robot applications in our future, and with some dedication to making them accessible and usable, we can significantly impact how the general public perceives and interacts with the robots we put out into the world.

The user experience should be considered throughout the development of a product, not just before or after. (Credit: Based on Ben Melbourne’s image)

The many components of User Experience Design. (Credit: By Thomas Glaser, based on Dan Saffer’s work)

Gazebo Terrain Modification Tool paper prototype for user testing.

The synthesis phase of a full-fledged iteratively-designed project. (Credit: Paul Caravelli and John Horstman)

OSRF is pleased to welcome Dirk Thomas! Dirk has more than 6 years of professional software development experience. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the Technische Universität Darmstadt in 2010, which was concentrated on Robotics Middleware.

Dirk has been a successful RoboCuper since 2003 as part of the Darmstadt Dribbling Dackels in the Sony Aibo league as well as the Humanoid Kidsize team Darmstadt Dribblers. Before joining OSRF, Dirk worked at Willow Garage leading the development of the new build system in ROS during the Groovy release, developing the framework for Qt-based graphical ROS tools rqt and maintaining the core ROS packages. Dirk is excited to join OSRF and will be working on the next generation of ROS as well as improving the supporting infrastructure.

OSRF folks know that students love Open Source software, Robotics and flip flops. Do you want to spend your summer doing real-world software development, contributing to robotics projects like Gazebo, ROS, and CloudSim, and engaging with the global robotics community, all while getting paid? Then check out our GSoC 2013 site. You’ll also want to read through our ideas page, which lists projects that we’re interested in. Feel free to ask questions and propose suggestions at gsoc2013@localhost. The student application period starts April 22nd. Get ready for a robotics coding summer!.

OSRF is pleased to welcome Tully Foote! Tully has been a core ROS developer for many years, and he is looking forward to continuing that work. Tully attended Caltech and UPenn earning his BS and MS while working on all three of the the DARPA Grand Challenges. He most recently has been working on ROS at Willow Garage as well as many other projects including designing the TurtleBot.

OSRF is pleased to welcome Paul Mathieu! Paul is a software engineering intern with the ROS Team and works on bringing binary support for ROS on ARM platforms. He recently obtained a MSc. in Robotics at the University of Tokyo where he was working on indoor navigation of a quadrotor UAV with an on-board depth camera, and a MSc. in Aerospace Engineering from Supaero (France). Recently arrived from France, he enjoys California’s lifestyle and clement weather.

OSRF is pleased to welcome William Woodall! William is a Software Engineer and a robotics enthusiast. He joined the Open Source Robotics Foundation as a member of the ROS development team in February of 2013. Before that he worked at Willow Garage on general ROS development and supporting internal Willow Garage projects. Before that, he built an awesome autonomous lawnmower. He will apply his software engineering and design skills to improve the state of open source robotics at OSRF.

We’re pleased to announce that the ROS project will soon be hosted by Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab (OSL). 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@localhost.

Tully and Melonee were recently interviewed about their creation, the TurtleBot. Congratulations to both for the impact they’ve had on the entire community!

OSRF is pleased to welcome Isaac Saito! Isaac Saito is a software engineering intern with the ROS Team, working in particular on the RQT GUI framework. Before coming to the US from Japan to get his M.sc in Systems Engineering at Southern Methodist University (Dallas, TX), he worked on a web search system for Keio University (30K+ affiliates organization) working closely with IBM Tokyo Research utilizing information retrieval, and also built pedestrian navigation prototypes for mega-sized train stations with East Japan Railway.

ROS experts Dirk, William, and Tully recently joined OSRF and are settling in to the ROS Cave to continue their work on the software. To celebrate, we took a field trip to K1 Speed for a friendly but competitive go karting grand prix. Highlights from our outing included: a minor crash, one driver’s inspiring journey from last to third place, two emotional awards ceremonies, and the realization that Kazuto, our intern from JSK, looks great in a yellow headsock. While some egos were bruised, it was great to get out of the building and unwind in tiny cars.

Registration for ROSCon 2013 is now open. Early registration ends March 31st. We’re looking forward to seeing many of you in Germany in May!

From ros-users@:

The Robonaut team has launched a TopCoder challenge to create a controller for our ISS taskboard simulation that improves the behavior of the switches, etc. and publishes the states to rostopics. If you’d like to help out (and potentially make up to $1500), check out the challenge here.

From the challenge description:

Robonaut 2 is the first humanoid robot in space and was sent to the space station with the intention of taking over tasks too dangerous or too mundane for astronauts.
But Robonaut 2 needs to learn how to interact with the types of input devices the astronauts use on the space station. To do that, we have built several Taskboards for Robonaut to play with.
In future challenges, you will control Robonaut and teach him how to interact with the Taskboard. But first, the simulation for the ISS Taskboard needs to be fixed.

For full requirements, please check here.

Recently Willow Garage, maker of the PR2 service robot and developer/custodian of the ROS core, announced that their funding model was about to change. This has precipitated speculation about the future of ROS and, by extension, ROS-Industrial. What has not been widely communicated is that the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF), an independent nonprofit company founded last summer with support from Willow Garage, was chartered in-part to become the long-term home for ROS core development, ROS wiki hosting, and ROS answers support. OSRF recently announced that key ROS developers from Willow Garage soon will move to OSRF. We have been in communication with both Willow Garage and OSRF and know that the ROS core is in the capable hands of the same developers who are credited with its widespread adoption over the past five years. Furthermore, we note that OSRF is participating in the ROS-Industrial Consortium kick off meeting March 6-7^th (agenda). We look forward to continuing collaboration with both Willow Garage and OSRF as open source robotics continues to accelerate the growth and capabilities of robotic systems.

A Press Release from Clearpath Robotics

Kitchener, ON, Canada – February, 2013

We have received many inquiries about the future of ROS since the announcement of a change in Willow Garage’s business plan. To our many valued clients, you may rest assured that we will continue to support and build upon ROS and open-source robotics software for our products.

We are proud to say that we were one of the first companies to support and use ROS, and we are humbled to see how much it has advanced the robotics industry. We believe that the strength of the global ROS community is at critical mass and we are confident it will continue to thrive and grow.

The transition of ROS stewardship from Willow Garage to the Open Source Robotics Foundation has been under way for many months and Clearpath will do everything in it’s power to assist with this transition. Our position as a partner to both academic and industrial research has given us a unique perspective on commercializing robotics from the lab to the real world, and the ROS ecosystem is making this happen faster than we had ever hoped.

The first 5 years of ROS has changed our industry forever. We can’t wait to see what the next 5 years of ROS will bring.

The ROS-Industrial team was at the Automate trade show a couple of weeks ago. Here’s a great video showing the ROS-Industrial capabilities that they demonstrated:

As we mentioned on Monday, here at OSRF we’re starting to play a more prominent role in the ROS community. As a major step in that direction, we’re pleased to announce that, in the next few weeks, Tully Foote, Dirk Thomas, and William Woodall will be joining OSRF!

You probably already know each of them from ros-users@ and ROS Answers, not to mention GitHub. And if you’ve used ROS, you’ve used their code, as they work on many of the core ROS libraries and tools.

We’re excited to have Tully, Dirk and William on the team and are looking forward to being a part of their future contributions to ROS.

First of all, we’d like to extend a heartfelt thank you to Scott and Steve and the entire Willow Garage team who have, over the last five years, made an unprecedented contribution to the robotics community. Willow Garage set out to have impact, and there can be no doubt that ROS has had a worldwide impact, on a scale greater than we ever hoped. Thank you!

As you may have heard, there are some changes underway at Willow Garage.

Given the recent news, we’re working with our friends at Willow Garage to accelerate the transition of ROS stewardship to OSRF. One of the goals in establishing OSRF was to provide a long-term home for ROS, and that’s where we’re headed with this transition. Through generous support from the National Robotics Initiative, we’re assembling a team at OSRF to continue to guide the development of ROS. We don’t expect ROS development to slow down, nor do we expect any interruption to the online resources that we’ve all come to rely on (e.g., the ROS wiki and ROS answers).

At OSRF, we look forward to taking a more prominent role in the ROS ecosystem. We’ll be seeking increased community involvement in ROS development, decision-making, maintenance, and support. Open source software works best when everyone is invested and involved, and we will work closely with the ROS community, including product development groups, research teams, students at all levels, hobbyists, and interested groups everywhere.

Here’s to ROS’s next five years!

OSRF is pleased to welcome Kazuto Murase! Kazuto studies Mechano-Infomatics at the University of Tokyo in the JSK Lab. He has been developing a robot with arm and eye, integrating recognition and action to perform tasks.

At OSRF, he will apply his experience developing rosjava/Android applications to improve the suite of apps available for use with robots, including new tools for managing deployment and launching of apps. He is excited to learn about America and have a true California experience during his time at OSRF.

OSRF is pleased to welcome Carlos Agüero! Carlos received his Ph.D. and M.S. from Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Computer Science, under the supervision of Dr. José M. Cañas and Dr. Vicente Matellán. Carlos is a Robotics enthusiast, and the multidisciplinary aspects of robotics and the challenges faced by real robotics projects have sculpted his formation and career. Ad hoc networks for mobile robots were the target of his early days of research. He designed and developed an autonomous system for detecting overtaking maneuvers applied to trucks. Carlos’s research has been focused on multi-robot object localization, task allocation and multi-target object localization. He has been a proud RoboCuper since 2005 and is a co-founder of Spiteam, the RoboCup Standard Platform League team. He co-developed a complete robot architecture (Behaviour-based Iterative Control Architecture, BICA) from scratch for the Nao robot applied to robot soccer and Alzheimer therapy.

Before joining OSRF, Carlos held a faculty position in the GSyC department at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos and was Director of the Telematics and Computer Systems Master program. In 2010 and 2011, he visited the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, and CORAL Research group at Carnegie Mellon University.

OSRF is pleased to welcome Jose Luis Rivero! Jose Luis is a Computer Engineer from the Carlos III University of Madrid. During his university times he was tempted by compilers and customized binaries and joined the Gentoo Linux project as developer for 6 years. Jose Luis moved from Madrid to Barcelona to finish his studies at UPC University. There he started work in the Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial (IRI). Being an open source enthusiast, and together with his colleagues Guillem Alenyà and Sergi Hernandez, Jose Luis began The Humanoid Lab initiative, which brings robotics and open source projects to university students. In his last two years at IRI, Jose Luis worked with PhD students to improve software practices and encourage development of open source ROS code for mobile robotics and perception and manipulation. For Jose Luis, working at OSRF, producing robotics software following an open source philosophy, is a dream come true.

OSRF is pleased to welcome Ian Chen! Ian received a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Auckland in 2011 under the supervision of Bruce MacDonald and Burkhard Wünsche. Ian spent his PhD investigating methods for improving the robot development cycle, particularly through the use of real time simulation and visualization. After a short interlude working as a software engineer on the open source Qt framework, Ian is excited to be back in the realm of robotics where he can continue his career in robot simulation and open source development at OSRF.

Call for Proposals: ROSCon 2013
Stuttgart, Germany
11-12 May 2013
(immediately following ICRA)

Details: http://roscon.ros.org/
Proposals: submit@roscon.ros.org
Questions: info@roscon.ros.org

ROSCon 2013 is a chance for ROS developers of all levels, beginner to expert, to spend an extraordinary weekend learning from and networking with the ROS community. Get tips and tricks from experts, network, and share ideas with fellow developers from around the globe.

ROSCon is a developers conference, in the model of PyCon and BoostCon. Following the success of the inaugural ROSCon in St. Paul, Minnesota, this year’s ROSCon will be held in Stuttgart, Germany. Similar to last year, the two-day program will comprise technical talks and tutorials that will introduce you to new tools and libraries, as well as teach you more about the ones you already know. The bulk of the program will be 30-40 minute presentations (some may be longer or shorter).

Want to present at ROSCon? Submit a proposal! For details on proposing, go to http://roscon.ros.org/

If you don’t want to make a formal presentation, you should still bring your new project or idea to ROSCon!

There will be sessions of Lightning Talks, which are 5-minute mini-talks that are scheduled just-in-time at the conference. There will also be open space for Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) meetings, impromptu hacking sessions, and informal presentations.

On behalf of the ROSCon 2013 Organizing Committee:

• Alexander Bubeck, Fraunhofer IPA
• Tully Foote, Willow Garage
• Ryan Gariepy, Clearpath Robotics
• Brian Gerkey, Open Source Robotics Foundation
• Florian Weisshardt, Fraunhofer IPA
• Matthew Williamson, Rethink Robotics

OSRF is pleased to welcome Steven Peters! Steven recently defended his PhD thesis, “Optimal Planning and Control for Hazard Avoidance of Front-Wheel Steered Ground Vehicles,” in the MIT Mechanical Engineering Department. At OSRF, he will apply his experience with dynamics and control to physics simulation for robotic manipulators and vehicles. As a Northern California native, he is happy to be back home.

OSRF is pleased to welcome Jimmy Sastra!

He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics from
the University of Pennsylvania in August 2011 under the supervision of Mark Yim. Working with Mark, Jimmy developed hardware and software for many generations of Modular Reconfigurable Robots. In his thesis work, he showed that these robots can be used to quickly prototype and analyze a variety of dynamic locomotion gaits from rolling like a wheel to running with compliant legs. They can even put themselves back together after they are kicked apart into separate pieces.

Prior to joining OSRF, he worked at Willow Garage, where he learned a number of things, including how to pull a good office prank.

OSRF is pleased to welcome Hugo Boyer! Hugo received a mechanical engineering degree from Ecole Polytechnique of Montreal and has been a professional developer for over 15 years. Recently, at Makerbot Industries, he created Miracle-Grue, Makerbot’s first tool path engine for 3D printers. Before that, he worked on parallel GPU algorithms for the computational chemistry lab at McGill University, and was an architect of SIMSAT, the real time spacecraft simulator of the European Space Agency. Hugo is honored to join the OSRF simulation team where he hopes to help make robot dreams come true.

OSRF is pleased to welcome Stephen Brawner!

Currently a Computer Science PhD student at Brown University working with Chad Jenkins in the Brown Robotics Lab, Stephen is joining us as a software research intern for Fall 2012 / Winter 2013. He’ll be furthering his interest in researching hardware and software testing to improve robot system reliability and reduce the iteration time on development.

We’re pleased to announce a collaboration between OSRF and Yujin Robot. Our friends at Yujin have been long-time supporters of and contributors to ROS. In particular, they’ve been at the forefront of efforts to use ROS on Windows and in multi-robot environments. Daniel Stonier from Yujin presented on the state of ROS on Windows (slides) this year at ROSCon.

In the new Robotics in Concert project, funded by the Korean Ministry of Knowledge Economy, Sam Park and his team at Yujin are leading an international team to develop tools to enable authoring, deployment, and management of multi-robot systems in production environments. OSRF’s role in the project is to enhance and improve the ROS/Android toolchain to make it easy to build reliable “robot apps” that provide phone/tablet-based human interfaces. We’re looking forward to collaborating on this project with Yujin and other robotics groups in Korea, and are expecting some great open source software to result.

And we’re looking forward to playing with the sleek new KobukiBots:

There’s exciting news out of Boston today with the launch of Rethink Robotics’s new robot. Rethink Robotics is developing a family of low cost and highly intelligent robots that can perform simple tasks in a manufacturing environment, increasing the productivity of the people around them. Rethink Robotics was founded by Rodney Brooks, former Director of the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and co-Founder of iRobot Corporation.

Rethink’s robots can be taken out of the box, taught a task by anyone, and start work in a few hours, eliminating the need for systems integration. They are safe to interact with people at close range and are easy to train and retrain on the fly. They are nothing like any existing industrial robots.

While all of this is very exciting for the robotics industry, and certainly for our friends at Rethink, what we personally find most exciting is the role played by ROS in today’s news. Rethink’s new Baxter robot is, in the words of CEO Scott Eckert, “built upon ROS.” We had some hint from Rethink’s (then Heartland’s) support of ROSCon 2012 that they were doing something with ROS, but we were very pleasantly surprised today to hear that ROS is such a central part of Baxter.

As ROS edges closer to its five-year anniversary, this is a great milestone for the ROS community. Rethink is actively hiring for a Senior Developer Relations Engineer with expertise in ROS, and expects that individual to play an important role as part of the ROS community.

Congratulations to everyone at Rethink Robotics, and we are looking forward to their contribution to the ROS community.

We’re happy to announce that Nate Koenig successfully defended his PhD dissertation yesterday. You might not have known that, in addition to his work on Gazebo, Nate has been pursuing his Computer Science PhD in the USC Interaction Lab with his advisor Maja J Mataric’.

In his dissertation, titled “Robot Life-Long Task Learning from Human Demonstrations: A Bayesian Approach,” Nate enabled robots to learn goal oriented long-term decision processes from human demonstrations. The approach facilitated knowledge transfer between tasks, and online task modification. We’re honored to have another doctor on the staff at OSRF. Welcome back, Dr. Koenig!

OSRF is pleased to welcome Morgan Quigley! Morgan recently defended his PhD thesis, “Hardware and Software Systems for Personal Robots,” in the Stanford Computer Science Department. At OSRF, his work will span software, firmware, and embedded design, by creating infrastructure to allow seamless communication and coordination between ROS and embedded systems.

As the “godfather of ROS,” Morgan gave the opening keynote at ROSCon2012. He’s had a hand in the design and development of many robots, including this one from Sandia.

Brian was recently interviewed by Bill Morris of I Heart Robotics about OSRF.

We especially want to thank Steve Cousins, CEO of Willow Garage, who has been instrumental in the creation of OSRF. We’re working closely with Willow on software projects, notably Gazebo and ROS, and we look forward to Willow’s continued support of OSRF’s mission.