Following ROSCon JP 2018, and a successfull local event organized in 2018, ROSCon Fr 2019, was held in Paris, France on the 10th and 11th of June 2019. ROSCon Fr 2019 was held in conjunction with the Open Source Robotics Foundation. This post follows the same structure than the one written by @gbiggs . We like to thank him for advices and for the inspiration in creating local ROSCon.
59 tickets were sold, and 80 people participated on the day (including sponsors’ invitations and excluding staff). The livestream had a steady 45 people watching at any one time throughout the first day, and 30 people the second day. Thanks to all the participants, ROSCon Fr was an exciting day for all. Presentation slides and videos will be published on the website in a few weeks.
The invited talks, submitted talks and lightning talks were of high quality. As our second local event, we consider ROSCon Fr 2019 to have been a success and a credit to the French ROS user community. We had less participants than our previous event (110 people) but it might due to an increase number of European ROS related events, and the fact that IV 2019 was held at the same time.
Invited talks
The first invited talk was given by Brian Gerkey of Open Robotics. Talking about the history and future of ROS, he gave us a perspective on future developments concerning Gazebo through Ignition and the ROS 2 main strategy.
The second invited talk was given by Ludovic Delval from IPA-Fraunhofer and the ROS-Industrial consortium. He described use cases where ROS is deployed in factory environment. His talk was interesting for the audience coming from the industry (roughly 50 % ).
As for the previous events, in addition to their talks, both Brian and Ludovic were able to make new contacts amongst the French robotics community and contribute to further improving participation by French roboticists in global open source robotics activities. All the participants of ROSCon Fr 2019 benefited from their presence.
We had three key-notes:
- Fernandez Esteve, Apex.AI : Autoware (co-authored with Christopher Ho)
- Mikael Arguedas, Independant : Développer un système robotique avec ROS 2 Dashing (co-authored with Karsten Knese)
- Thomas Moulard, Amazon : Is ROS 2 ready for production? A look at ROS 2 reliability, performance and security improvements.
We gave enough time to the audience to ask questions and several were given through social media.
Submitted talks and lightning talks
ROSCon Fr 2019, mixing the ROSCon method and the French research community, established a programme committee and made a public call for submissions. The programme committee received 20 submissions.
After review by the programme committee, the 20 presentations were selected and given presentation slots ranging from 10 minutes to 30 minutes (based on the speaker proposals). The presentations were selected covered a broad range of ROS-related topics, such as
- a presentation from SNCF (French National railway company) introducing ROS-Railways;
- a joint presentation between SNCF and Generation Robots to present a novel method to detect and follow rails;
- the introduction of RUST with ROS 2 by Easymov,
- a roscontrol layer for dynamixel servo motor by LORIA;
- an introduction on how to use ROS to control buildings;
- a demonstration on how you can use ROS for your own personal home projects such as rosfying an Anki robot;
- a discussion of how Amazon is robustifying ROS 2 to deploy robots application in a cloud environment.
Also in the ROSCon and developer conference tradition, half an hour of the programme was made available for lightning talks. It was fun and interesting for both the presenters and the audience.
Sponsors
ROSCon Fr 2019 was sponsored by the following companies and organisations:
Gold: SNCF, Generation Robots
Silver: Easymov Robotics, SMART-AIP-PRIMECA
Bronze: SBG Systems
Friendship: GT-4 Architecture et controle GT-7 Robotique humanoïde
Social events
To encourage networking between participants, ROSCon Fr provided both a catered lunch and a catered reception. Attendees were able to enjoy a good meal without leaving the conference venue, giving them more time to discuss with each other.
The reception in particular was well-attended.
Final remarks
ROSCon Fr 2019 was a success and demonstrated both to us and to the French ROS community that people are welcoming this event. We believe that ROSCon Fr 2019 is providing a real interest to the community, encouraged many new connections, and demonstrated real commercial interests.
We’re already preparing ROSCon Fr 2020 and welcome feedback from the community !
I wish I could have been there, but I did manage to catch some of it on the live stream.