Hi All,
As discussed previously we are in the process of electing the next ROS 2 Technical Steering Committee community representative. If this is your first time hearing about the election I would encourage you to read the previous post on the matter:
This year we have six wonderful candidates competing for exactly one community representative slot.
Below you will find a list of all of your potential candidates. The candidates have submitted videos, brief biographies, and short written statements on their plans for the TSC. Voting opens today and you will have until 2022-12-08T07:59:00Z to rank the candidates.
The TSC charter states that we must use the Condorcet method of voting for the election. The best solution I have found using this approach is the Condorcet Internet Voting Service (CIVS). To use this service you simply follow the link below and rank the candidates in your preferred order. Since voting is open to anyone we are retaining e-mail addresses until the election has completed. TSC reserves the right to void the election if we suspect vote tampering / manipulation. (If someone wants to write a Condorcet plugin for Discourse please drop me a line).
Cast your vote by following this link
2022 ROS 2 TSC Community Representative Candidates
Candidate Francisco MartĂn Rico (@fmrico)
Francisco’s Biography
I am an associate professor at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid, Spain. I am a Computer Science Engineer and have a Ph.D. in Robotics. I coordinate the degree in Software Robotics Engineering at my university, where I teach ROS to the new generation of engineers in several courses related to software architectures for robots, planning, and cognitive systems. I currently coordinate the Research Group Intelligent Robotics Lab, in which we participate in several national and international projects as consultants and experts in ROS/ ROS2, ensuring the stabilization of ROS as an essential actor in the frontier of knowledge in Robotics.
I have extensive experience using ROS in many robots and projects in the last few years. I currently contribute to relevant ROS 2 packages, such as Nav2 and Behavior Trees, and am the author of several packages, such as PlanSys2, MOCAP4ROS2, and cascade lifecycle. I have contributed to the community’s growth through ROS/ROS 2 outreach talks, tutorials, repositories with examples, and a recently published ROS 2 book. I have been awarded as the best ROS Developer 2022 at ROS Developers Day 2022.
I am a strong defender of Open Source and of the importance of the role of the Community in ROS. My goal as a member of the TSC is to actively represent the ROS User and Developer Community, fostering its growth and claiming its central role in the course of ROS.
Relevant Links:
- Github: fmrico (Francisco MartĂn Rico) · GitHub
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/Fmrico
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/fmr1c0
- Mastodon: Francisco MartĂn Rico (@fmrico@mastodon.social) - Mastodon
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fmrico/
- Google Scholar: ‪Francisco MartĂn‬ - ‪Google AcadĂ©mico‬
Francisco’s Candidate Statement
I am applying to the TSC as a member of the ROS community, the academic community, and as a passionate robot geek. My experience as a ROS developer, professor, and firm defender of Open Source makes me consider myself suitable to represent the ROS community at TSC.
My objective as a member of TSC is to participate in the discussions actively, always offering the vision of the community I represent, defending its central role in the past, present, and future of ROS. I intend to open all communication channels to receive opinions, comments, and ideas that may be forwarded to the TSC.
Candidate David V. Lu!! (@dlu)
David’s Biography
My name is David Lu!! I’ve been working with ROS since 2010 when I was working on my PhD at Washington University in St. Louis. I am currently an independent contractor, though previously I’ve worked for PickNik, Locus, Bossa Nova and Willow Garage, and have also worked with the PR2, Stretch, and a handful of robotic arms. The bulk of my work is focused on navigation (I authored the robot_navigation stack and help maintain the standard ROS 1 navigation stack), and have also contributed many other ROS-centric projects, such as roscompile, ROS Metrics, ROS Clock and ROS Map. I’ve presented at ROSCon four times and was the Co-Program Chair twice. As far as publicly available ROS 2 work, my main contributions have been the ROS 2 Driver for Hello Robot’s Stretch robot, the ROS 2 port of MoveIt Setup Assistant and the command-line tool ros_command for making ROS 1 commands work easily in ROS 2.
Please visit davidlu.dev for links to all my projects and social media accounts.
David’s Candidate Statement
I’ve been a ROS developer for over a decade, and I care very deeply for this community. A major theme of my work over the years has been to try lower the barrier of entry for ROS. People have always had a hard time getting started with ROS, and I believe that the problem has only gotten worse with ROS 2. In an effort to make ROS 2 fit for more use cases than ROS 1 (e.g. Windows, automotive applications), it feels like every command and every API has thirty more options that make straight-forward use cases exponentially harder. I am a single developer and devote the resources where I can to making ROS 2 easier to use. My goal for participating in the TSC is to help allocate developer effort and discussion focus toward the things that every day roboticists are encountering, rather than the details that are more maintainer-oriented.
Candidate Jash Mota (@parzival)
Jash’s Biography
Links
*Website
*github
*ROS Answers
*twitter
Education
B. Tech Mechatronics from NMIMS University, Mumbai, India
Work history
Entrepreneur-in-Residence, Entrepreneur First (Singapore)
Founder, Centauri Robotics Pvt Ltd. (Mumbai)
Bio
Hi, I’m Jash!
I’m robotics engineer working on automating indoor farms.
I started using ROS in 2017 in second year of my undergrad, when I was trying to build autonomous robots. Since, I’ve worked with ROS to build indoor AMR (coverage path planning, autonomous exploration, ROS to web communication) and built a washed-down mobile base which is used by students and robotics companies in APAC region, currently being considered by Indian Space Org (ISRO).
As someone working on AgTech robots, being in the ROS2 TSC would help ROS2 more useful for the growing industry, with more projects and a better user community for the use case. I hope in the coming weeks our contribution would be beneficial to the community members trying to build projects for outdoor or indoor farms.
Previous open-source work
- RIDE: GitHub - jash101/ride: RIDE automatically creates the package and boilerplate OOP Python node scripts as per your needs
- CK-9: GitHub - centauri-robotics/ck9: Code for CK-9 Robotics Development Kit
- Beta tester for Linorobot2: GitHub - linorobot/linorobot2: Autonomous mobile robots (2WD, 4WD, Mecanum Drive)
Jash’s Candidate Statement
Hi, I’m Jash. 5 years ago when I tried ROS to build an indoor AMR, what surprised me and what I loved was how easy it was for even a student to build real robots. I still get the same feeling, every single day. Without ROS, learning by doing has been difficult, quickly prototyping has been difficult, interoperability has been difficult. As the field develops the opportunity for ROS2 expands to making it easier for different kinds of robots.
Being on the younger end of the spectrum, I find myself uniquely placed to empathize with problems students, and folks early in their career face. I have seen 20yo founders who have started successful robotics companies thanks to ROS, and I’ve met others who are also successful but don’t want to use ROS because it was hard for them to get started, which I think hurts the robotics community.
I want to bring focus to different emerging markets where the industry has potential, like AgTech. I see a few problems with ROS2 today. Open-RMF, while groundbreaking, is not easy or well documented for beginners. Secondly, ROS is still designed towards indoor wheeled robots, which might not always be desirable. As someone from a 2nd tier city in India who only got started with robotics because of ROS, I would love to give back by participating in steering development in ROS2 towards wider set of users across the world.
Candidate Ruffin White (@ruffsl)
Video
Ruffin’s Biography
Ciao! My name is Ruffin White, although most may only recognize my user handle, @ruffsl. I’m currently a researcher in the Software and System Verification group at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, a research team focused on static analysis and its applications. Before moving to Italy, I earned my MS in Computer Science at Georgia Tech and my PhD at UC San Diego, advised by Dr. Henrik I. Christensen. During my doctoral studies I also worked at Open Robotics, culminating in a number of contributions showcased at ROSCon, including ROS + Docker, SROS and more. As an active member of the Nav2, Rust, and Security Working Groups, my interests have focused on breaking down technical transfer barriers between research and industry by improving usability, accessibility, and security of open source robotics software development.
Fun Fact!
My first real foray into ROS started with ROS Groovy Galapagos in 2013 while developing an aerial robotic platform for inspecting civil infrastructures at the Robotics Institute CMU. Two years prior during my undergrad participation at IGVC, our then entire software subteam rage-quit due to issues with ROS Diamondback. As the lead of the electrical subteam, with a vaguely negative first impression of ROS, I opted to continue software development using the only programming environment known to us remaining electrical and mechanical students… LabView. Thus we learned the hard way that reinventing the robotic wheel, even via visual programming, would be no simple task, let alone collaborating on anything LabView using revision control. And so, it wasn’t until my second encounter, using ROS for 3D SLAM at CMU, that I came to truly appreciate the value of ROS’s ecosystem and community.
- Ruffin White | about.me
- Doctoral Thesis: Usable Security and Verification for Distributed Robotic Systems
- ROSCon Talks
Ruffin’s Candidate Statement
With the formation of the ROS 2 Technical Steering Committee, our community has benefited greatly from its gathered leadership, focus and domain expertise, as well as the commitment and pooling of resources needed to execute upon decision making. However, prior to the TSC charter amendment, such decision making was reserved only to parties who could meet the FTE requirements for TSC membership, consequently excluding smaller community sub-groups, including: hobbyists, academics and startups. With the addition of elected community representatives as members of the ROS 2 TSC, and with myself squarely identifying among each of the aforementioned sub-groups, I would like to nominate myself for election to become your next community representative.
Having continuously engaged with the community through my entire graduate studies, all the while learning, developing, and teaching ROS in various institutions, inevitably evolving from lab ROS guru to campus ROS evangelist, I’d like to think I have a finger on ROS’s pulse in academia. Speaking of the grass-roots, I’ll admit I’ve admonished ROS’s academic past, particularly on original design priorities and security, but I’d also like to affirm the profound importance that academia has on ROS’s future. As with any other professional software ecosystem, such as MATLAB, Simulink, Solidworks, and Adobe et al., the importance of onboarding students is paramount for the growth and sustainability of our community.
If elected, my priorities will include representing this constituency, particularly ensuring ROS2 retains its academic community. For example: advocating for linear-ish lesson paths in documentation (like with mdBook) to avoid ROS’s notorious discontinuous learning curve or analysis paralysis. For hobbyists, I’d also like to reduce friction points for smaller contributors, e.g. friendlier CI experiences or automation of environment setup (like GitHub Codespaces). Admittedly, I’ll have my own biases, such as scrutinizing design decisions from more of a security perspective, or advocating for greater support and adoption of Rust in ROS2. If you share these ambitions, please let me know.
As a final means of persuasion as to what merit a hobbyist, academic, and startup founder like me has in serving as your community representative, I’d like to close with a powerful quote from one of my favorite SciFi films, which you may recall that my first ROSCon security talk was themed around:
“If we all reacted the same way, we’d be predictable, and there’s always more than one way to view a situation. What’s true for the group is also true for the individual. It’s simple: Overspecialize, and you breed in weakness. It’s slow death.”
Candidate Dominik Nowak (@donowak)
Dominik’s Biography
I’m CEO & co-founder at Husarion (Booth 11 at ROSCon 2022 
), a provider of autonomous mobile robots for reserach, education and custom service (outdoor) robots. I’m also a CTO & co-founder at Husarnet an open source, peer-to-peer VPN that we designed with ROS and ROS 2 in mind.
Here are a couple of facts and links about myself:
- Education: I’m graduate a of AGH University of Science and technology in Krakow (Electronics & Telecommunications)
- Work history: after graduation I have started the PhD studies, but quit to focus on the robotics company I founded one year after my master studies. Husarion is now 9 years old, is profitable (last investment round 5 years ago), 30 person team that I’m proud of.
- My (our) robots - when I started my journey with robotics I was a student and I just made robots for fun eg. “LAN controlled mobile coilgun with web UI and video streaming”. Initially we started Husarion with the idea of providing hardware and software building blocks allowing users to build their robots easier. I learned about ROS in 2015 during Bots&Beers event in San Francisco. After I returned to Poland we decide to focus on ROS. Right now our company sells 3 off-the shelf products ROSbot, ROSbot-XL and Panther.
- Both me personally (visit my GitHub and my companies (Husarion’s GitHub and Husarnet’s) contribute a lot of open-source ROS and ROS 2 code with real use cases for ROS.
- I wrote also a few blog posts about using ROS 2 in Docker deployments and how to connect them over the Internet:
- Connecting Remote Robots Using ROS2, Docker & VPN
- Connecting Remote IoT Devices Powered by Micro-ROS
- Scalable Distributed Robot Fleet With Fast DDS Discovery Server
- Bridge Remote DDS Networks With a DDS Router
Dominik’s Candidate Statement
- I have strong experience in creating custom DDS profiles (for Cyclone and Fast DDS) that work both in Wi-Fi and over the Internet. I’d like to provide valuable feedback on how to connect ROS 2 powered robots over the network in an easy way.
- My companies work with ROS on a daily basis and integrate different ROS packages, DDS setups etc. in commercial use-cases. Some of these use cases are open source and easy to reproduce in simulation. I think this “system integration insight” will be valuable for the TSC.
Candidate Essowe Justin Bakoubolo (@Justobak01)
Justin’s Biography
Currently, Justin is a graduate student in Big Data and robotics at Junia ISEN Lille. In my current role, I am using data analysis and processing to deploy cloud based atuomation projects,a bot, and visualization using state-of-the-art algorithms.
Justin has an established passion to find meaning in machine learning and robotics to solve problems of diverse nature in the world and Africa. I am found of continuous improvement in automation and engineering. I intend not only to have excellent technical fluency in related technologies and Frameworks (ROS, QskitLearn, Keras, Scikit-Learn, SQL, AWS) but also care about community foundations and efficient management approaches (Scrum, Deming cycle, human management). As such, I am investing time to learn more about such technologies, contribute to the science in this field and ensure its application.
My previous experience includes root cause and data analysis to develop suitable automation software for an international organization. I have managed more than 2 projects which have reached over 100% of the objectives upon completion, namely by developing a robotic application using Fanuc and ABB robots. I was awarded a Scholar of Year prize in 2019 and I have also achieved a growth of over 25% of active members for the robotics association that I am currently leading. As a personal project, I have developed the first speech recognition model for Ewe, a language spoken in West Africa, to enhance proximity with clients and to enhance quality service.
I believe with the application of machine learning and robotics technology, quality service delivery in the health, education, and industry sectors will improve.
Useful Links
Github links :
Projects demos :
Distinctions :
- ROSCON22 Diversity scholarship
- Ashinaga Africa Initiative scholarship
- Double Trophee Togo National Debate Competition - Togo
Justin’s Candidate Statement
Umbaji is a start-up in the field of Artificial Intelligence and robotics which provides high-level and state-of-the-art solutions and services to businesses in Togo and Africa with the ambition to leverage socio-economic growth by the mean of advanced technologies. Umbaji makes advanced
technologies available to everyone. As the promoter of Umbaji, I developed a speech recognition model for Ewe, a local language spoken in Togo, Benin, and Ghana.
Additionally, As the president of the robotics association of Junia, I am strategically leading a community of over 200 people to share our passion for robotics and promote free access to robotics. As a result of one year’s activity, the team and I managed an R&D for the development of an AMR prototype for France’s Robotics Championship with as much as 600 €.
I had also been the global coordinator of the global AISA (AAI scholars’ association).
As a result of my experience, I am confident that I assess the technical and leadership to represent the ROS local community in west Africa and potentially during steering committees. Conversely, I am striving for the improvement of ROS by local communities in Togo and Lille as I believe ROS is state-of-the-art in robotics development.
Currently, I am working with associations in Togo, one especially which would help reach over 1200 members . The agreement of the partnership would include using developing a tech stack for low-memory robots atop ROS.
