Robot Operating System Meetup Russian 2019

In the world of robotics, a software framework has been developing for a long time and successfully that allows you to quickly prototype robotic systems - Robot Operating System (ROS). We at Sberbank Robotics Laboratory are actively using it in the development of our own projects. Having accumulated some experience and noting that there has not yet been a single practical meeting on ROS in Russia, we decided to organize it and share knowledge, and at the same time get to know the robotics community. ROS Russian Meetup 2019 will be held in Skolkovo as part of the Skolkovo Robotics 2019 Forum on April 16, this is an opportunity for ROS developers and robotics of all levels to devote one day to a live exchange of experience and communication with the community. If you are familiar with ROS, then you can safely go to the registration form, there is also a program and organizational information. At the meeting we will discuss the history of ROS and the principles of the community, we will devote a lot of time to practical reports on SLAM and indoor laser lidar navigation, and a robot path planner. We will show how to control industrial manipulators via ROS, how to use sensor data, how to work with the SMACH state machine. And we’ll even tell you how to install ROS without problems and start developing a robot.
By the way, participation in the meeting is free, but since the number of seats is limited, we ask you to wait for confirmation. And for those who are not familiar with ROS, we offer a small overview.


Two-dimensional view of the world through the eyes of ROS

Robot Operating System is a software framework for robots that implements the basic algorithms for building complex robots. It includes a set of tools, libraries and standards designed to simplify the task of creating complex and reliable robot behavior on a wide variety of robotic platforms.

The main ideology of the project is the principles of open source, documentation of packages, code reuse and the global community of robotics.

Why was it created

Creating truly reliable, universal robotic software is difficult. From the point of view of the robot, problems that seem trivial to the person result in the high complexity of the developer programming the robotic system. It is so difficult to work with these tasks that sometimes it is not possible to solve them alone or in a small team.

As a result, ROS was created from the ground up to stimulate collaborative software development for robotics. For example, one laboratory may have indoor SLAM experts and may offer a world-class SLAM system. Another group could have experts in using SLAM for navigation, and another group could develop a computer vision approach that works well for recognizing small objects in a messy environment. ROS was designed specifically for such groups to collaborate and build on each other's work.

Short background

ROS is a large project with a history and a large number of participants. The need for an open collaboration system was needed by many people in the robotics research community, and many projects were created for this purpose.

In the mid-2000s, Stanford University made various efforts related to the use of AI in robotics, for example, the STanford AI Robot (STAIR) program and the Personal Robots (PR) program for creating custom prototypes of dynamic software systems designed for use in robotics . In 2007, Willow Garage provided significant resources to further expand these concepts and create prototypes. The efforts were supported by countless researchers who shared their time and experience both to contribute to the basic ideas of ROS, and to the main software packages. All software was developed using the BSD open source license and gradually became a widely used platform in the community of robotics researchers.


Three-dimensional world view through the eyes of ROS

Global ROS Community

From the very beginning, ROS was developed in several institutions and for several robots, including many institutions that received PR2 robots from Willow Garage. Although it would be much easier for all participants to host their code on the same servers, over time the “federated” model has become one of the strengths of the ROS ecosystem. Any group can run their own ROS code repository on their own servers, and they completely own it and control it. They don’t need anyone’s permission. If they decide to make their repository publicly available, they can gain the recognition of the community they deserve for their accomplishments and benefit from testers and suggestions for improvement, like all open source projects.

Over the past few years, ROS has grown and now includes a large community of users around the world. Historically, most users have been in research laboratories, but they are increasingly appearing in the commercial sector, especially in industrial and service robotics.

The ROS community is very active and has more than 3,000 members on the discourse.ros.org list, over 8,000 users on the joint documentation wiki and about 22,500 users on the site for answers to ROS questions. Wikipedia contains more than 22,000 pages, and the pace of edits is about 30 per day.

At the moment, the number of Russian-speaking ROS users is in 15th place among other countries according to ROS Metrics Report 2018. Let's meet, discuss and fix it. You can also learn about the ROS capabilities for your projects, about the real practice of developing robots.

To participate as a listener fill out the form .

And if you have an interesting message for the community, you can still become a speaker .

Program:


Organizer of the event - Sberbank Robotics Laboratory.