Despite the pandemic, ROSConFr 2021 was held virtually on the 22th and and 23th of June 2021.
The initial plan was to hold it in conjunction with the RoboCup. But this event was postponed in 2022.
ROSCon Fr 2019 was held in conjunction with the Open Source Robotics Foundation. This post follows the same structure than the one written in 2019 and inspired by @gbiggs .
The event was free for anyone.
The livestream had a steady 65 people watching at any one time throughout the first day, and 60 people the second day. Thanks to all the participants, ROSCon Fr was an exciting event 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 third local event, we consider ROSCon Fr 2021 to have been a success and a credit to the French ROS user community.
Given the exceptional situation we are very happy that so many people attended the video stream.
Invited talks
The first invited talk was given by Bence Magyar (@bmagyar), Research Scientist at Five AI.
Talking about the history and future of ros(2)_controls, he gave us a perspective on future developments concerning the hardware interface and the controllers.
The second invited talk was given by María Merlan (@mamerlan, eProsima), Jan Staschulat (@JanStaschulat Bosch) and Pablo Garrido (@pablogs eProsima). They described Micro-XRCE and micro-ROS.
It started with a very clear and easy to follow introduction on how to bring ROS-2 to micro controllers by Maria.
Jan gave us precisions on the architecture and how to code with rclc.
The last part was a live demonstration realized by Pablo.
Due to the format, it was not possible for Bence, Maria, Jan and Pablo to make direct new contacts. But we had a public chat with numerous questions by the French robotics community.
This chat was actually extremely lively and contribute to further improving participation by French roboticists in global open source robotics activities.
All the participants of ROSCon Fr 2021 benefited from their participation.
The format was 45 minutes of presentation and 15 minutes of questions.
We would like to thank them again for their presentation to this event.
Compare to last year we had no keynotes.
We could not have social events due to the pandemic.
Submitted talks and lightning talks
ROSCon Fr 2021, mixing the ROSCon method and the French research community, established a programme committee and made a public call for submissions. The programme committee received 15 submissions.
After review by the programme committee, the 15 presentations were selected and given presentation slots ranging from 20 minutes to 50 minutes (based on the speaker proposals). The presentations were selected covered a broad range of ROS-related topics, such as
- Very impressive new robots: Reachy (Pollen Robotics, Kangooroo (TOWARD and PAL Robotics), NB-120 (Nimbl’Bot) from French startups
- ROSIN funded project: ROS4PRO and ROS In Occtanie
- An industrial deployment of ROS for warehouse activities by Rapyuta robotics
- Extensions for ROS-2 Corail for real-time on ROS-2, tracing ros2 events with ros2_tracing, ros2_control feedback for complex I/O control.
- Formal verification with Fiacre (LAAS), and Robot Skills Toolchain (ONERA) showing how to program and certifiy the execution of complex missions
- Demonstration of a final European project based on ROS-2 (Magellium) for complex robotics assembly in space, and another project for Agricultural robotics (XLIM).
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 but did not work as well as it did in 2019 probably due to the format. We had only 3 compare to 20 in 2019.
Live Demos
We had three live demos: one from our invited guests by Pablo (eProsima), one from Nicolas (Luos), the last one during the lightning talk of @doisyg (Wyca) with PlotJuggler.
Live stream statistics
For the event we used BigBlueButton an open source solution. It was supported by LAAS/CNRS.
Sponsors
ROSCon Fr 2021 was sponsored by the following companies and organisations:
Gold: Generation Robots
Friendship: Robotics Place, GT-7 Robotique humanoïde, 2RM and SMART
Final remarks
ROSCon Fr 2021 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 2021 despite the situation was welcome and is providing a real interest to the community, encouraged many new connections, and demonstrated real commercial interests.
We’re already preparing ROSCon Fr 2022 and welcome feedback from the community !
