Acceleration Robotics organized the ROS Developers Meet in India with the goal of creating a cohesive community of Indian ROS Developers.
The ROS Developers Meet, held at College of Engineering Pune(COEP) on the 17th of January in Pune was organised by Acceleration Robotics with the goal of creating a cohesive community of Indian ROS Developers. The inspiration for the meet came from Prateek, our CEO, and Gaurav, our CPO, attending ROSCon held in Kyoto, Japan in 2022. 250+ people registered for the event with around one third of them being from robotics companies and the rest being students. The event was attended by 93 people.
After an introduction to ROS and the international ROS Community by Gaurav, Prateek began the talks by introducing the attendees, a large chunk of whom were university students, to ROS 2. Prateek provided an overview of the features and capabilities of ROS 2, and discussed how ROS 2 is getting more industrial traction. Chirag, a robotics software engineer at Acceleration Robotics, then showed a demo of our work in using Open-RMF in an outdoor navigation scenario.
Harsh Deshpande, a research engineer at the reputable Fraunhofer IPA, followed the above by introducing by elaborating on the ROSin effort, an initiative led by ROS Industrial to create an open source framework in a competitive environment. Harsh shared insights and lessons learned from the ROSin effort, and further explained how open source licensing works which was a point of interest for many of the attendees.
Jegathesan Shanmugam, a lead robotics engineer at a major aeronautical manufacturer, took the stage next and discussed the lessons learned while building a real time perception pipeline in ROS 2. Jegathesan took a deep dive into the various executors and transport mechanisms available in ROS 2 and analysed their performance.
Pranshu, the head of tech and operations at Rigbetel Labs, showed how their startup has created open source hardware platforms which enable new entrants to quickly get ROS-based hardware up and running. Pranshu’s talk was well-received by the student attendees, who mentioned that moving from simulation to hardware was one of the major challenges for them.
The last talk of the evening was given by student representatives from the Robot Study Circle of COEP about their usage and challenges faced while using ROS for research and prototyping. The speakers addressed these challenges in the Q&A session after all the talks had been presented.
This is the link to all the presentations
The event was a great success and provided a great knowledge sharing avenue for all people involved. We had attendance from the excellent roboticists at Unbox Robotics, Bosch, Black Coffee Robotics and many other companies. Overall, the event was a great starting point and provided a valuable networking opportunity for attendees, who gained a deeper understanding of the capabilities of ROS 2 and got valuable insights on their ROS issues from fellow roboticists.
Acceleration Robotics aims to continue this community effort further!