ROS News This Week

Katherine_Scott · 2020-05-08T17:51:17.591Z

Hi Everyone,

This week I tried something a bit different. As I was moderating ROS Discourse and Twitter accounts I kept a running markdown file of all of the interesting robotics related stuff I saw. I don’t have time to thoroughly review and write about everything, but I figured that at least summarizing the week would be helpful for the community.

Feel free to post your own finds in the comments below and engage in shameless self promotion of your projects.

ROS news for the week of 5/4/2020

ROS Projects and Releases

PAL Robotics MoveIt Tutorial
Plot Juggler 2 Released!
Cartesian (XYZ) robot standard interface for ROS.
ROS pull request survey.
MoveIt 2 used in production work cell.
Fergs is writing again, lots of great information here!
Go for ROS tutorial
Clearpath robots now support Windows
3D models of SubT robots posted on Sketchfab.
SubT Virtual TestBed “Hello World” tutorial.

Legged Robotics

Champ Hexapod ROS Interface
Standford Pupper open hardware legged robot
Plot Juggler + Champ Robot

Events

Construct ROS Awards 2020
Free Apex.ai/Autoware autonomy course dropping mid May.
World Move It Day 6/2

COVID-19 Response

COVID 19 first responders discuss their robotics needs.
Wired article on medical robots.
TurtleBot for COVID19 response.

SLAM / Perception Goodies

PySLAM Python SLAM library.
MIT SPARK Lab Kimera tutorial: metric SLAM + semantic segmentation.
New NAVSTACK SLACK / Landing Page
Installing YOLO 4 on Ubuntu
Event Cameras from ETH Zurich

Miscellaneous

Maker Faire Kyoto (#mfkyoto2020 on twitter) looks really fun!
- ROS Bead Setting Robot
- ROS Candy Delivery Robot
Long video series on building a chain drive arm from scratch.
ROS Kinetic Nintendo Switch Controller Tutorial (Japanese)

smac · 2020-05-08T18:15:35.347Z

Navigation2 Slack: navigation2.slack.com. Please introduce yourself on the on-boarding channel with your interests, goals, etc! All are welcome.

Katherine_Scott · 2020-05-08T18:19:09.825Z

You also have to take a video of yourself saying “NavStack Slack” five times fast.

smac · 2020-05-08T19:22:13.597Z

2020-05-08-121947

Ask and ye shall receive. And I’ll raise you an infinite loop.

Repping my PickNik shirt from @mlautman, gave me the shirt right off his back. What a guy.

Edit: I’m really hoping this doesn’t reappear anywhere in the future…

Achllle · 2020-05-09T00:29:59.697Z

I built an Open Source Mars Rover that runs on ROS: https://www.freedomrobotics.ai/blog/building-the-nasa-jpl-open-source-rover
Looking for more folks to build one too!

gbiggs · 2020-05-11T02:49:52.381Z

smac:

Ask and ye shall receive. And I’ll raise you an infinite loop.

He just won’t stop talking!

smac · 2020-05-11T08:14:46.658Z

gbiggs:

He just won’t stop talking!

Is that something new?

Patrick · 2020-05-11T10:24:40.821Z

Thanks @Katherine_Scott for this weekly news update! I hope to see more of this in the future!

ruffsl · 2020-05-12T23:45:58.103Z

Katherine_Scott:

MIT SPARK Lab Kimera tutorial: metric SLAM + semantic segmentation.

Hey, I’ve been working on a ROS2 port of Kimera-VIO. More help is always welcome:

GitHub

GitHub - MIT-SPARK/Kimera-VIO-ROS2

Contribute to MIT-SPARK/Kimera-VIO-ROS2 development by creating an account on GitHub.

You can checkout the README.md in current PR for more progress info:

github.com/MIT-SPARK/Kimera-VIO-ROS2

WIP | Refactor kimera_vio_ros port

MIT-SPARK:master ← MIT-SPARK:package/kimera_vio_ros

opened 08:42AM - 20 Feb 20 UTC

ruffsl

+1936 -48

github.com/MIT-SPARK/Kimera-VIO-ROS

Porting to ROS2

opened 12:47AM - 06 Feb 20 UTC

closed 11:40PM - 12 May 20 UTC

ruffsl

I'd like to ask if there would be any interest in porting the Kimera ROS wrapper… to ROS2. I'm currently in progress of developing the port, and am at a stage where I'd like to reach out to collaborate further. I have a compiling and running prototype modeled after the existing ROS1 wrapper, but included a number of performance improvement to take advantage on newer paradigms and features in ROS2. Areas I'd like to extend include: * composable nodes so both kimera and sensor nodes can be co-located in the same process * https://index.ros.org/doc/ros2/Tutorials/Composition * use of zero copy transport or loaned messages when composing nodes is not applicable * https://github.com/ros2/rmw_iceoryx * use of multithreaded executors for reducing message callback latency * https://index.ros.org/doc/ros2/Tutorials/Intra-Process-Communication * SROS2 Security, etc... References: * https://index.ros.org/doc/ros2/ * http://design.ros2.org/