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!
OSRF welcomes our GSoC students
OSRF is pleased to welcome Gonzalo Abella, Esteve Fernandez and Andrei Haidu, our first-ever students for the Google Summer of Code!
Gonzalo is an M.S. student at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos. He is a member of the Spiteam RoboCup SPL team. For the last two years, he has been involved in medical research using the Nao robot in therapies for people with Alzheimer’s. As a GSoC member at OSRF, he hopes to improve ROS core by developing a new Parameter API.
Esteve is an M.S. student at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, advised by Prof. Vladimir Estivill-Castro and Prof. Jorge Lobo, and a member of the UPF-Griffith RoboCup Standard Platform team. His research focuses on multirobot localization and coordination in unreliable networks. He holds an M.S. in Computer Engineering from Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and a B.S.E. in Computer Engineering from Universitat de Barcelona. A frequent contributor to free and open source software, Esteve is a PMC member of Apache Thrift and a committer at Twisted, and has given talks at PyCon US and Europython.
Andrei is a fourth semester M.S. student in Informatics at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), majoring in Software Engineering. Since 2011 he has been working in simulation at the IAS Group from TUM, currently The Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IAI) since the group has moved to the University of Bremen.
We’re excited to work with Gonzalo, Esteve, and Andrei in the coming months, and look forward to their contributions this summer!
Closing In On Virtual Robotics Challenge
While Memorial Day is the unofficial first day of summer and most people turn to thoughts of barbeques and vacations, the situation here at OSRF is much different. That’s because it’s only a matter of days until the DARPA Virtual Robotics Challenge (VRC).
There’s lots of information on the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) website at http://www.theroboticschallenge.org, but the immediate task before us is a key stage in the DRC where all qualifying teams will run their robots through a computer simulation of some of the anticipated tasks from the live DRC events.
OSRF has developed a simulator for DARPA (more details of our relationship are available at FBO.gov), with the plan that the virtual test environment will play a catalyzing role in development of future robotics technology, allowing new hardware and software designs to be evaluated without the need for physical prototyping. The simulator is an open-source, real-time, operator-interactive virtual test bed, with models of robots, robot components, and field environments.
Needless to say, all of us at OSRF are focusing on making the VRC a big success.
May 31 was the last day for teams to qualify for the VRC, and qualifying teams are able to practice until June 8.
The VRC takes place from June 17 to June 27, and DARPA will announce soon after which teams will advance to the DRC Trials taking place in December 2013.
Details of the DRC events, track structure and participating teams can be found at http://www.theroboticschallenge.org/local/images/DRC_Schedule.png.
ROSCon slides and videos posted
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 welcomes Ben Charrow
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.
OSRF welcomes Sarah Elliott
OSRF is pleased to welcome Sarah Elliott! Sarah is a software engineering intern at OSRF. She is currently completing her BASc in Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo. She spent two previous internships at Willow Garage working on Android control of robots and the mobile manipulation tool MoveIt. At OSRF Sarah will once again be focusing on Android and ROS compatibility, with the goal of allowing developers to easily create apps for robots.
ROS-Industrial @ 1 year (video)
Can you believe that ROS-Industrial is already 1 year old? Here’s a great montage video showing the variety of things that have been accomplished in that time:
ROSCon 2013!
Update: Attendee photos are coming together in on G+.
We just closed another successful ROSCon here in Stuttgart. We had about 300 people this year, up 50% from 2012. There were many great talks and demos, and an impressive exhibition area. We’ll post more in the next days after we’re home and get some rest. For now:
OSRF Teaching at the ROS-Industrial Training Class
[Cross-posted from the ROS-Industrial blog]
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.
Designing for Usability in Open Source Software
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)
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