First wanted to introduce myself - I’m Michael (aka Mike Likes Robots), a Developer Advocate for Robotics at AWS, and I love robots. My YouTube channel has a few videos now (see here) and I’ve just started a blog and Getting Started with Cloud Robotics guide (see here).
I want to meet others that are also using the cloud for robotics - in any capacity! What are you using cloud for? Is it useful? Anything to watch out for? Let’s open a discussion around it.
If there’s enough interest, I would even consider starting a working group. I am passionate on the subject and willing to organize meetings etc. Let me know if you would be interested here.
I’m all for starting a group again and would attend, however the last working group we had on robot web tools did not last very long. Attendance dwindled. Granted, that’s not exactly the same as what you are proposing, but very similar. Here are the notes from that working group if you are interested.
What would you envision the charter of that working group to be? Your videos and guides seem very AWS focused.
Seeing how this went last time, I’m inclined to suggest an alternative format that is not a working group but a (virtual) meetup series where we meet and talk about issues that arise in cloud robotics and web tools, perhaps with speakers if we can find them. I’m, of course, always happy to speak about Transitive, and you seem to be a good presenter, too, but I think we’d need a longer short-list of speakers before it make sense to start something.
I feel that people like us who work on robotics + cloud + web are lacking representation and a community, so anything that fills that gap seems like a good start to me, so long as we find enough “reason to hang”
That’s great! I appreciate the links - just had a read through the meeting notes.
The charter would be to collate cloud technologies and improve their use in robotics, plus show how cloud can make robots better. I definitely don’t want to make it AWS-specific - the benefits can be seen on any cloud platform, and we should have the best tools for the job.
As for the near future, I was thinking:
Low numbers - sharing stories and links in ROS Discourse.
Middling numbers - shortlist some speakers and start a meetup series, as you suggested.
High numbers - organize a more formal working group and start to collate tools etc.
I can definitely bring in speakers from AWS, but I don’t want to saturate the speaker list with AWS!
Have you talked to Ken Goldberg’s lab over at UC Berkeley? They’ve been putting in the work on this front. I can introduce you if you would like.
Also, just to clarify, there are community working groups and ROS 2 TSC sanctioned working groups. I am assuming that you would like to create the former? If you are looking to create the latter you would need to talk to the Amazon TSC rep Matt Hansen (I can’t find his Discourse handle at the moment). I would suggest you two find some time to meet.
I’ve already been talking to Mike and support this effort. I ran the cloud robotics meetup at the last 2 ROSCons and we had 35-40 people show up so I think there’s enough interest in this to get something going at least as a community WG for now. I don’t know that it needs to be a TSC sanctioned WG yet.
Cloud / Cloud Native ecosystem for Robotics is still lagging behind the industry standard
Regardless of the Cloud Vendor / Cloud Service Provider, We need a unifying ecosystem (exactly how CNCF has built) for Robotics in Cloud. I understand I am doing Grave Injustice to the CNCF community by oversimplifying their ecosystem but I feel this is the starting step
Cloud WG for Robotics could also open us to the possibility of discussing about new Light-weight ROS distros which can be a further track of innovation
I would like to know the scope for this Cloud Robotics WG.
It seems that people are interested in how to take advantage of cloud services?
I am more interested in Cloud and Edge Robotics Platform as Infrastructure.
As CNCF Edge IoT Team, we have published a couple of whitepapers from CNCF.
of course, those are not only for robotics and robot application.
So I would like to have discussion on robotics and robot use cases and cloud-edge collaboration robotics solution and configuration, if that counts in this Working Group.
Hope we’re not too late to the party - can you please include us in the working group? We’re currently into services, but looking to explore cloud robotics options.
My name is Julien Enoch, I’m working for ZettaScale and I’m committer for Eclipse Zenoh.
I would like to participate to this WG, please.
I could present how Zenoh can already help in Cloud Robotics use cases and I also would like to hear more about the different requirements the community have in this domain.
Also interested to join, especially with respect to robotics data processing and analysis! My recent ROSCon '23 talk (Surviving the Flood) touched on some of these topics.
Let me know how I can help! Looking forward to it!