ROSCon 2023 is almost here!
Hi Everyone,
ROSCon is this Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday! I wanted to post a brief update before the event.
Lightning Talks 
I’ll open up the ROSCon Lightning Talk submission form on Wednesday morning at the start of ROSCon. The submission form will be on the ROSCon website and QR codes will be posted in the registration area. I’ve posted screenshots of the form and our requirements below so you’re not scrambling at the last minute.
Lightning Talk Rules, Regulations, and Recommendation
Here are our rules. regulations, and recommendations for putting together a successful lightning talk:
- Lightning talks should be LESS THAN A MINUTE LONG and STRICTLY NO MORE THAN TWO MINUTES LONG.
- Lightning talks are due by the end of the first coffee break on the first full day of ROSCon: (11:10am CST, October 19th, 2023). No late submissions will be accepted.
- Talks will be selected at random and announced at the beginning of lunch on the first day of ROSCon.
- If you are selected you will be contacted by the committee and provided with your lightning talk session time and the order in which you present.
- During the lightning talk session your slides will be preloaded so please be ready to talk in that order.
- Once your slides are submitted you will not be allowed to change your slides.
- Each ROSCon attendee is allowed to submit exactly one lightning talk.
- If you are using Google Office for your talk slides MAKE SURE THAT SLIDES ARE PUBLICLY ACCESSIBLE. We will not request access to your slides.
- Slides and videos in other formats must be less than 100MB.
- The lightning talk speaker must be present at ROSCon and in the speaker queue next to the stage at the start of the session. No remote talks are allowed.
- Slides are not required, and there’s no particular format, however the slides must work on the coordinators’ laptop so common portable formats such as pdfs are recommended.
- Videos are also okay but should be edited to fit inside the time limit and should not rely on the audio from the video.
- Given the time constraints, we would recommend against trying to do a live demo.
- If you are providing a link to a resource use a link shortner (like bit.ly) and/or a QR code.
- We recommend that presenters use no more than four slides for their talk, and optimally less than that. We do not recommend you try and compress an existing talk into two minutes.
- If you run into issues with the form, or have any questions please e-mail: roscon-2023-ec[@]openrobotics.org. ## Submission Form
Here are screen shots from the lightning talk submission form so everyone knows what to expect.
ROSCon Live Stream 
For those of you not joining us at ROSCon (or those of you at ROSCon who need to take a break from the event), we will have a live stream of the event.
The Wednesday workshops will not be live streamed, but starting first thing Thursday morning we should have the ROSCon live stream up and running on the website. We’ll also create a pinned ROS Discourse post with the live stream information. We’ll have two live streams running; the primary stream will cover Celestin DE (the main, shared room), and a secondary stream covering Celestin ABC. The streams will run from open until close on Central Standard Time.
Recordings for ROSCon will be up on the website a few weeks after the event. We do not know exactly when, so we would appreciate your patience.
Other Stuff
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WHOVA App – Make sure to download the WhoVa conference app before Thursday. While I’m really skeptical of conference apps, the feedback from last year was so good that even I am going to give it a try this year. There is a community section in the Whova app where you can arrange meetups / happy hours, ask the organizers questions, find jobs, and a whole lot more.
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Birds of a Feather Sessions – Make sure you check out the Birds of a Feather sessions for ROSCon 2023. This year we’ve set aside three dedicated areas for Birds of a Feather sessions at ROScon, with about ten BoFs planned for this year. If you would like to organize your own BoF use this form to sign up.
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Social Media – I’ll be keeping an eye on the ROS social media while the event is happening. If you see something cool, feel free to ask permission and snap a photo. If you tag it with roscon2023 or roscon or ros on LinkedIn or Twitter we’ll likely share it with the rest of the ROS community.
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Group Photos – We’ll have our group photo after the Lightning Talks at the end of the first day before the reception. We should have plenty of time to take photos of working groups and other affinity groups on stage after the big group photo so stick around. If you could have your group congregate in one area and then send a representative over to the photographer that would help us a bunch! We’ve also created a short sign-up form here.
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Exhibits and Demos – Make sure to set aside some time to check out our sponsor booths. New this year we will have a demo area where the sponsors can show off their new robots. I’ve put a map of the exhibitor area below.
Thanks to our Speakers, Sponsors, and Volunteers
Finally, I want to make one last shout out to our sponsors, speakers, and volunteers that help to make ROSCon possible. ROSCon is a huge effort and we couldn’t make it possible without you!
Platinum Sponsor
Gold Sponsors
- Bosch
- Canonical
- Dexory
- Foxglove
- Intel RealSense
- Intrinsic
- Luxonis
- O3DE
- Picknik
- Qualcomm
- Robotec.ai
- ROBOTIS
- Roboto
- Technology Innovation Institute (TII)
- Zettascale
Silver Sponsors
- AgileX
- AIVOT
- Clearpath Robotics
- Cogniteam
- Concurrent RT
- Ekumen
- Formant
- Lulav Space
- Otto
- Robotinik
- ROS Industrial
- Tangram
- TDK
- Techman Robot
- Tormach
- Viam
I suggest trying to catch a few of the talks you are most interested in when they are live - and if you really want to you can do a screen capture (or take screenshots of slides) so you have some references until the video recordings + slide PDFs are released. Last year roscon was the 20th & 21st of October and the videos were available on the 10th of November (
