ROS News for the week of August 7th, 2023

[Katherine_Scott]

ROS News for the week of August 7th, 2023

After fourteen years, and tens of thousands of questions, ROS Answers is officially end of life! It was a pretty good run, and the whole team is excited to move to Robotics Stack Exchange for answering all your questions.

This week our friends at PickNik let it be known that they will hold MoveItCon the day before ROSCon (2023-10-17T07:00:00Z)! Details should be posted in the next few days. Early bird ROSCon tickets are currently on sale, along with a discount if you register from the PX4 Summit. Don’t delay! Prices go up 2023-09-03T07:00:00Z.

Georgia Tech Smoothing and Mapping Library, aka “GTSAM”, is now available for ROS 2!. Maybe some enterprising open source developer will finally make a ROS package that implements an interface to this awesome real-time NERF-SLAM library. If you actually do this I will send you a pile of ROS swag.

Open Robotics will be attending the world’s largest agricultural robotics conference, FIRA 2023, in Salinas, California on 2023-09-19T07:00:00Z→2023-09-21T07:00:00Z. If you plan on attending please let us know. If you are in the Bay Area considering swinging by for a day!

Events

• 2023-08-14 - 2023-08-25 ROS Summer School
• 2023-08-20 PX4 Dev Summit Developer Diversity Scholarships
• 2023-09-19 → 2023-09-21 TechCrunch Disrupt (ROS Heavy Lineup)
• 2023-9-19 → 2023-09-21 FIRA USA Ag Robotics Conference in Salinas
• 2023-09-26 ROSCon JP
• 2023-09-29 ROSCon Madrid
  • • ROSCon Madrid Schedule Released
• 2023-10-02 → 2023-10-04 IROS Simulated Humanoid Robot Wrestling Competition
• NEW 2023-10-17 MoveItCon @ ROSCon!
• 2023-10-18 → 2023->10-20 ROSCon 2023 New Orleans
• 2023-10-21 → 2023->10-22 PX4 Developer Summit New Orleans
  • PX4 Dev Summit Schedule Released

News

• San Francisco had a week with respect to autonomous vehicles:
  • 55 Reports of Robot Cars Interfering with SF Fire Department
  • Cruise, Waymo get green light for Robot Taxis in SF – SF Chronicle – TechCrunch – Robot Report
• Have Series A funding rounds returned back to earth?
  • Skyline Robotics Raises $3.35M for Window Cleaning Robots
  • Olis Robotics Raises $4M for Remote Robot Management
  • BirdSong Raises $2.3M for Inspection Drones
• Serve Robotics gets SPAC’d – Robot Report – But are they ready to go global?
• Robot Dogs Used in Houston During Police Standoff
• August 2023: Which robotics companies are hiring?
• Skydio ends Consumer Drone Sales
• Human Toddlers Inspire Robot Learning
• Home Robot Mobile Manipulation Challenge
• Super Handy 3D Rotation Converter Tool
• Anybotics $50M Pitch Deck Leaked
• ICCV 2023 SLAM Challenge
• Autonomous Boat, Powered by Pixhawk and a Raspberry Pi, Targets an Atlantic Crossing
• Run Autodesk Fusion 360 on Linux?!!

ROS

• ROS Answers is Dead. Long live Robotics Stack Exchange
• 35 New 187 Updated Packages for ROS 2 Iron Irwini
• First Edudcation Working Group Meeting Announced
• Drone Message Standard
• Gazebo-Based Virtual Robot X Platforn 2.3.1 Release – Demo Reel
• GTSAM for ROS 2!
• Autoware Challenge Extended to September 1st, 2023
• ROS Sonar SLAM
• Manipulation on the Move – Paper
• NERF Slam: Real-Time Dense Monocular SLAM with Neural Radiance Fields.
• Edge Impulse wrapper for ROS 2 Humble
• 3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering
• ArUcoGlide: Low-Cost Motion Tracking to Improve HRI & Avoid Collisions. – paper
• An open source implementation of MIT Cheetah 3 controllers
• DIY Dev Droid with microROS and ROS 2
• Extended Map Server for Nav2
• ESP32-Based LCD for Robots

[AndyZe]

After fourteen years, and tens of thousands of questions, ROS Answers is officially end of life!

Tens of thousands of questions, answered by @gavanderhoorn himself! And a few thousand for the rest of us.

[gavanderhoorn]

Thanks for the kind words

It wasn’t that many though, and we’ve had many, many people contributing over the years.

Even though ROS Answers wasn’t always regarded as useful (I remember quotes from scientific papers where it was almost dismissed as being “only for absolute beginners”), I guess there were many who did find it a valuable resource, given the many interactions on that site and the upvotes and comments.

I like(d) helping people, and I hope robotics.stackexchange.com can fulfil a similar role. I just won’t be posting there

[brettpac]

@gavanderhoorn, Just out of curiosity, why won’t you be posting there?

[gavanderhoorn]

Life, mostly (ie: other things).

And, minor, but due to the way the migration is performed, I’d have to basically start from scratch (wrt privileges and site access). That’d take time, but see “Life, mostly” above.

I’ve nothing against RSE or the migration to it. In fact, I believe it’s a good thing. I realise the way I phrased it may have given a different impression, but that wasn’t my intention.

[gbiggs]

@gavanderhoorn

And, minor, but due to the way the migration is performed, I’d have to basically start from scratch (wrt privileges and site access).

This actually turned out to be not entirely true. We were told a long time ago that reputation and so on would not carry across. Thus that is what we communicated to users of ROS Answers:

@tfoote

You will not receive reputation for past votes, but questions and answers will be associated with your Robotics Stack Exchange account as well as future votes on the migrated questions.

However, we found out just a few days ago that when the import was performed by Stack Exchange, the system granted reputation points for all questions you had answered. Before last week, I had something like 10 reputation on Robotics Stack Exchange. That’s not the case anymore (much to my surprise). Nor is it the case for you, it appears! Congratulations on being the #1 ranked person on Robotics Stack Exchange.

Having said that, “life” is a reason I can totally understand for having to step back from the huge time commitment that answering so many questions requires. Thank you for all your efforts over the years to help out ROS users.

[peci1]

@gavanderhoorn

And, minor, but due to the way the migration is performed, I’d have to basically start from scratch (wrt privileges and site access). That’d take time, but see “Life, mostly” above.

To help mitigate these consequences, I opened all the migrated questions and answers and voted for the others’ replies/questions again where I participated. But with my 20 questions and 40 answers it was a few minute job.

[gavanderhoorn]

@gbiggs

However, we found out just a few days ago that when the import was performed by Stack Exchange, the system granted reputation points for all questions you had answered.

seems it does indeed. I just noticed it myself.

Technically this still aligns with what @tfoote wrote I believe: he only said something about votes, not accepted answers. I just interpreted it as “no karma whatsoever” at the time.

@gbiggs

Having said that, “life” is a reason I can totally understand for having to step back from the huge time commitment that answering so many questions requires. Thank you for all your efforts over the years to help out ROS users.

Thanks. I gained an enormous amount of insight into how ROS worked, just by figuring out other people’s questions.

As I’ve written (and said) before: ROS Answers is basically a training manual, not a time sink.

[gbiggs]

@gavanderhoorn

I just interpreted it as “no karma whatsoever” at the time.

We pretty much did, too, so you weren’t wrong to.

@gavanderhoorn

As I’ve written (and said) before: ROS Answers is basically a training manual, not a time sink.

I totally agree with this. I also learned a lot of what I know about ROS by doing the research and playing around necessary to answer other’s questions.