Aerial Robotics community meeting October 9th, 2024,

[KimMcG]

Thanks for joining! Here is the recording of Wednesday’s meeting

Aerial Robotics ROS community group meeting Oct 9 2024

Announcements are:

• If you are joining ROSCon Odense, come and join the Aerial Robotics meetup! You can sign up in the Whova app
• ROSCon 2024 is sold out but keep an eye on the local ROSCons like China (11 12 nov) Germany (Dec 3-4) and India (Dec 5-6).

We also had presentation by Aaron Blue (Couloir labs). They are looking for beta testers for the Raven one so please contact them if you’d like to have early access. Otherwise it will most likely be released before the end of the year. Thanks Aaron!

Also we have updates on the aerial robotics landscape as of July:

• New course: ETHx: Autonomous Mobile Robots
• New summerschool: IEEE RAS summer school on Multi-robot Systems at Czech TU of Prague
• New hardwares: The Fly4Future RoboFly and custom drone designs
• New autonomy stack is Duckiedrone’s PiDrone_pkg

Also me and @mrpollo have an announcement about the setup of the upcoming meetings:

Hey everyone, we have an announcement to make. We are refocusing the efforts around the Aerial Robotics Community Work Group.

During the long summer break, we had a chance to think things through, and we came up with a new format that allowed us to impact the community in a more direct way.

• We are shifting the meeting cadence from bi-weekly to once per month. This will allow us to prepare more and to be more effective.

• New meeting format: Every meeting, we will be giving 20 to 30min to open source projects or companies that support the Aerial Robotics community. With an eye on improving the landscape we built. The second half of the meetings will be about community updates, and announcements. Essentially allowing us to be focused 100% on the aerial robotics landscape.

• We will stop the subcommittee work: Unfortunately, we couldn’t find a way to keep the committee engaged and focused, nor could we find more contributors willing to pitch in. All the while, there was an increased workload on planning and direction. We want to thank the committee members for your trust and encourage you to look into the projects already mapped in the landscape if you want to continue supporting the community.

• We’d like this group to be more of a platform for people to show their projects and cool work in the field of aerial robotics either from presentation or the lanscape, for other people to get connected to each-other though the meetings, ROS Discourse or the discord chat.

• We will not actively shape the direction of the ROS framework. Each one of you should consider your place as individual contributor. However, we will do our best to promote all aerial robotics work done by you.

• Both Kimberlyand Ramón will remain available to every subcommittee member and offer mentorships to help you succeed in your open source journeys.

We had some questions on this, like if there is anything going to change in the current communication channels like here on discourse or the #cwg-aerial in the Open Robotics discord server. We will continue to keep it open for anyone who would like to share work and for us to announce the meetings. As long as we are allowed to keep it let’s use it Please let us know if you have any other thoughts about this announcement.

Next meeting will be on November 20th after ROSCon, which will be a presentation by @Tuxliri about their latest iteration of the Duckiedrone! I’ll announce the meeting 2 weeks before in a new discourse thread. Don’t miss it

In the mean time, take a look at the Aerial Robotics Landscape and help us out with updating it!

Aerial Robotics Landscape