ROSCon Fr 2022 report

ROSConFr 2022 was held virtually and physically on the 23th of June 2022.
The initial plan was to hold it on the 22th and 23th of June. But due to organizational constraint it was reduced to one day.
We cautiously restarted the event given a wider use of remote working, and the possibility of new COVID variant emerging.

ROSCon Fr 2022 was held in conjunction with the Open Source Robotics Foundation.
This post follows the same structure than the past ones and inspired by @gbiggs.

The inscription fee was fixed to 60 euros to cover the organization expenses.

The conference had 41 registrations for physical attendance.
The livestream had a peak over 40 people watching through the morning, and 30 people the afternoon, despite technical problems for the streaming at the beginning.
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 fourth local event, we consider ROSCon Fr 2022 to have been a success and a credit to the French ROS user community.
After the pandemic we are very happy to meet each other again at to have many people attending the video stream.

Invited talks

The first invited talk was given by Denis Stogl (@dstogl), Stogl Robotics Owner.
Talking about the history and future of ros2_control, he gave us a deep description of the current developments to handle robots made of various parts,
controllers, mutliple interfaces, and chained controllers. His talk was done remotely.
Denis had many questions showing the interest and the questions on this project.

The second invited talk was given by Wolfv Vollprecht (@wolfv, QuantStack CTO) on RoboStack.
After introducing the benefit of using conda as packaging system, he shown us how
RoboStack is building packages from the ros recipes.

Thanks to our sponsor we were able to invite physically Wolf. The French robotics community could interact with him during the breaks and lunch.
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 2022 benefited from their participation.

The third invited talk was given Carlos Aguero (@caguero , OSRF) on our beloved Gazebo.
Carlos made an interesting focus on development to realize maritime simulation.
He has shown new shaders to render ocean waves, the physics behind the robot motion simulation.
He concluded with a description of the RobotX Maritime challenge.

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.
Due to the uncertainity that the pandemic had upon the organization it was decided to not host a party.

Submitted talks and lightning talks

ROSCon Fr 2022, mixing the ROSCon method and the French research community, established a programme committee and made a public call for submissions. The programme committee received 9 submissions.

After review by the programme committee, 7 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

  • A nice presentation from Canonical of the Hawksbill capabilities for providing snap images for the robotics community
  • YASMIN: A State Machine library for ROS-2
  • The ethercat_driver_ros2
  • ROS-2 for Spatial exploration at CNRS

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, 2 included live demos.
The last one demonstrated a space robot going in to a Martian lava tube.

Live Demos

We had two live demos: one on a robot playing chess in simulation by Ludovic Delval @ipa-led (IRT), the other one from @doisyg (Wyca) about their last port of cartographer tools on ROS-2.

Live stream statistics

For the event the streaming was supported by LAAS/CNRS.

audience

Sponsors

ROSCon Fr 2022 was sponsored by the following companies and organisations:

Gold: French Research Group on Robotics (Groupe de Recherche en Robotique)

Bronze: Canonical

Friendship: Robotics Place, GT-7 Robotique humanoïde, 2RM and SMART

Final remarks


ROSCon Fr 2022 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 2022 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 2023 (Bordeaux) and welcome feedback from the community !

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Thanks Olivier for organizing, again, this great event !

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