This is an excerpt from a recent News & Events ROS-Industrial Newsletter. We have been both absorbing feedback from our ROS-I Member events and community events, including the recent ROSCon. While we are still working on content and addressing hanging documents that are not current, we wanted to put this here for comment/feedback and continue to have a dialog on our mission to enable new reliable and performant industrial applications with ROS 2. If you do not get the ROS-I newsletters/comms, and would like to, you can sign up over at ros-i.org.
Updates to relevant resources and repositories
Along the way, and over the last 4 months a number of enhancements have been merged into open source resources. In many cases there have been write ups describing these updates such as the work out of the Focused Technical Project Robotic Blending Milestone 5, but also recent developments implementing improvements in industrial_calibration.
Also, there has been reorganizing of the GitHub resources surrounding ROS-Industrial, with the introduction of the ROS-Industrial Attic. This GitHub organization seeks to provide a better “archive” but separate from actively supported projects and repositories. There is still a lot of interesting content out there and we believe the attic is a great way to keep it available, but be clear about the state.
This brings ROS-Industrial open source project affiliated GitHub organizations to four:
- https://github.com/ros-industrial
- https://github.com/ros-industrial-consortium
- https://github.com/ros-industrial-attic
- https://github.com/tesseract-robotics
We are also preparing to update information regarding ROS-Industrial and support for ROS 2 to make it more clear the ROS-Industrial project’s commitment to ROS 2 while enabling those that have not yet migrated, still be able to leverage developed resources. In many cases this has been reflected in repositories that are pure CMake and then separate repos that contain the ROS and ROS 2 wrappers.
Furthermore, information regarding industrial manipulator support, highlight OEM engagement and supported capability releases, and how ROS-I drives to ensure manipulator interfaces are supported will more clearly defined. This may involve migration and update, or archiving of the ROS 1 wiki pages as they only serve to confuse the situation as it exists today. Thanks to all those in the community that have provided feedback highlighting the confusing nature of the information as it exists today.
A new monthly developer check-in starting in December 2024
For those that have been interested in Tesseract or are using Tesseract we are excited to announce some new things to keep an eye on. For starters, we will be scheduling a virtual meeting Tesseract monthly check-in. This meeting will have no formal agenda but is intended to enable those interested in learning more about, or sharing any challenges/successes with other Tesseract users and developers/maintainers. This will be held on the ROS-I Zoom platform. Stay tuned, details will be shared via this newsletter, Events — ROS-Industrial and ROS Discourse.