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Thank you for joining us for ROS World 2021!
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We're happy to announce that ROSCon 2022 will take place October 19th to 21st in Kyoto, Japan!
Attempting to load ROSCon Archive Listings.
ROS World will happen October 20th, and 21st!
Join us Online
ROS World 2021
ROS World 2021 is a chance for ROS developers of all levels, beginner to expert, to spend an extraordinary two days learning from and networking with the ROS community. Get tips and tricks from experts and meet and share ideas with fellow developers.
ROS World is a developers conference, in the model of PyCon and BoostCon. Following the success of the past ROSCons, this year’s ninth annual ROS World will be held online. Similar to previous years, the two-day program will comprise technical talks and tutorials that will introduce you to new tools and libraries, as well as teach you more about the ones you already know. The bulk of the program will be 10-30 minute presentations (some may be longer or shorter).
We aim for ROS World to represent the entire ROS community, which is global and diverse. Whoever you are, whatever you do, and wherever you do it, if you’re interested in ROS, then we want you to join us at ROS World. We encourage women, members of minority groups, and members of other under-represented groups to attend ROS World. We expect all attendees to follow our code of conduct.
The ROS World planning committee acknowledges that the barriers to attendance for traditionally under-represented groups may be many and varied, and we are striving throughout the planning process to make the event as inclusive and accessible as possible. This year we are proud to continue the ROS World Diversity Scholarship to help make ROS World 2021 more representative of the global ROS community.
We also welcome suggestions for what else we can do to encourage more participation. Contact us if you have ideas that you’d like to share.
If you don’t want to make a formal presentation, you should still bring your new project or idea to ROS World and present it in a lightning talk.
There will be an opportunity to give a lightning talk at ROS World. These are 2-3 minute talks, one session each day (3 minutes in the past but this may be reducing to 2.5 or 2 minutes this year). We expect to have many more people who want to present than slots are available. For fair access there will be a lottery for requesting to give a lightning talk. Talks from 2016 can be seen in this blog post or browse the recordings from past years.
There will also be open space for impromptu hacking sessions and informal presentations.
If you are looking for information on past ROSCons, including past programs, slides and videos of the presentations, see their separate websites.
During difficult times it is always good to remain optimistic; therefore in January, on the heels of multiple announcements about effective Covid-19 vaccines, we decided to move forward with plans to return to an in person ROSCon in 2021. Our plans included contingencies to scale up or scale down ROSCon based on the public health situation; as we were fairly confident that in-person gatherings could be done safely.
While the US has made great progress in the fight against Covid-19 we are once again seeing a massive surge in Covid-19 cases. The situation in New Orleans is particularly grim, and multiple large events such as Jazz Fest and French Quarter Fest have recently been canceled due to the rapid rise in Covid-19. These cancelations have coincided with the renewal of an emergency declaration for the state of Louisiana. Even with appropriate safety measures in place it simply isn’t a suitable time to gather in large groups in Louisiana. As such we have decided that the most prudent course of action is to cancel the in-person ROSCon.
But, we are still having a conference! Instead of the in-person ROSCon 2021, we will host our second virtual event, ROS World 2021, Oct 20-21! If you were able to attend ROS World last year, you know how engaging and vibrant an online ROS event can be, with thousands of attendees from across the globe. We hope that you’ll join us for ROS World this year!
We’re still coordinating with our sponsors, speakers, and staff to create ROS World 2021. We’ll be releasing more information in the coming weeks as our plans come together. At this point you may be asking how these changes may impact you; here’s what we can tell you right now:
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Attendees / Current Ticket Holders – we’ll be reaching out to you soon. We’ll refund / exchange your tickets and work with the conference hotel to cancel your rooms.
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Speakers – your talks are important to us and the ROS community – we still want to hear about your progress! Our team will be reaching out to ROSCon speakers to coordinate taking their talks virtual at ROS World.
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Workshops – We’re working on a plan to take the workshops on-line and keep the experience engaging. We’ll have more details shortly.
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Sponsors – we appreciate your support! We know your priority is engaging with the ROS community. We will work with you regarding your options and sponsorship packages that suit your needs. You should have already received an e-mail with details about the new event.
We’re planning ROS World 2021 as a two-day event; each day starts with a common shared session and then breaks into parallel tracks. The overall program will include most of the planned content from ROSCon. We’re also planning to add some community events to encourage socializing between members of the ROS community. We would love to hear your feedback about what sort of events you would like to see. Please reach out to us at roscon-2021-ec@openrobotics.org.
We know this is not the outcome we all had hoped for. We truly appreciate everyone’s support and patience as we put together our second virtual ROS World event.
I Need More Help!
If you have questions or concerns related to the cancellation of ROSCon 2021 please e-mail roscon-2021-ec@openrobotics.org.
Dates
Important dates to keep in mind for ROS World 2021.
Call for Proposals circulated
April 7th, 2021
Workshop submission deadline
May 7th, 2021
Diversity Scholarship application deadline
July 16th, 2021
Proposal submission deadline
July 9th, 2021
Proposal acceptance notification
August 17th, 2021
Sponsors
Thank You to Our ROSWorld 2021 Sponsors!
Platinum Sponsor
Gold Sponsors
Silver Sponsors
Bronze Sponsors
Friends of the Conference
Diversity Scholarship Sponsors
The following sponsors are supporting the ROS World Diversity Program, which is designed to enable participation in ROS World by those typically underrepresented in the robotics community to make the conference a more fulfilling experience for all attendees. To get a sense of the impact of prior years’ programs, which funded travel and lodging costs for dozens of scholars from around the world, we encourage you to watch this 2016 lightning talk from Ahmed Abdalla and Husam Salih, two students at the University of Khartoum in Sudan who talked about starting a robotics lab under extremely challenging conditions.
Video Archive Sponsor
The video archive sponsorship supports the recording of the talks as well as the publication of the video archives online for the greater community.
If you are interested in finding out more about sponsoring ROS World please contact the executive committee. Or view our sponsor prospectus.
attend
Register to Attend ROS World
Early Registration
If you register before or on September 17th, 2021, you will receive a promo code that gives you a 15% off discount on your purchase of ROS World 2021 t-shirts.
Late Registration
If you register after September 17th, 2021, you will still have the option to purchase a ROS World T-shirt; with a 10% off discount. Please be sure to review the shipping times in your confirmation email if you’d like to receive you shirt by the conference dates.
Ticket Prices
Tickets for ROS World 2021 are available on a sliding scale, We recommend the following prices:
- $20.00 - Students & Hobbyists
- $50.00 - Professionals
- $100.00 - Professionals (When reimbursed by employer)
As an add-on to ROS World Registration, workshop tickets are also available on a sliding scale. We recommend the following prices:
- $5.00 - Students & Hobbyists
- $10.00 - Professionals
- $20.00 - Professionals (When reimbursed by employer)
Program
Day 0 -- 10/19/2021
Pre-conference Workshops
10:00 CST
ROS 2 Executor: How to make it efficient, real-time and deterministic?
10:00 - 14:00 CDT Michael Pöhnl(Apex.AI),
Website The focus is on executors with experts from the ROS community working on this topic. The goal is to first learn about the use cases and reasons that led to the parallel activities in this area, and then trigger the discussion and consolidation so that the improvements are made available to the entire ROS community. An open-source reference system is presented, with which the differences between the presented executors are shown and with which the participants can later gain their own practical experience. Intended audience are all ROS users and developers that are interested in how software written with ROS is executed on the hardware, especially the ones who want to use ROS 2 in systems where they have to deal with resource constraints and real-time requirements.
ROS-I Workshop - Setting up an Industrial Scan-N-Plan Application
10:00 - 14:00 CDT Levi Armstrong, Chris Lewis(Southwest Research Institute) Website Scan-N-Plan has become a common means to enable flexible and agile processing in high mix environments. This approach enables end-users to present a wide array of parts without the tedious task of generating point by point teach pendant paths customized for each part. This workshop seeks to give an under the hood view and step through of setting up a Scan-N-Plan application with real hardware. This includes tool path planning, scanning reconstruction, part localization, motion planning and execution all in ROS2. The presentation will allow for testing of participant code on a Yaskawa HC10 Collaborative Robot outfitted with PushCorp active compliance device. The goal for attendees is a greater understanding of the associated tools available for ROS-based Scan-N-Plan applications work on industrial hardware.
Simulating Multiple Mobile Warehouse Robots using ROS2 and Unity
10:00 - 14:00 CDT Anthony Navarro, Devin Miller(Unity) Website Many industrial scenarios, such as order fulfillment in warehouses and distribution centers, require multiple robots to operate in a coordinated fashion. Instead of using one complex humanoid robot to perform all tasks, multiple different and specialized robots are used. Advances brought by ROS2 have made it easier to coordinate complex multi-robot systems, but testing them in simulation has still been challenging. In this workshop, you’ll learn how to use a game engine and ROS2 to simulate multiple mobile robots that must perform object pose estimation in order to complete a “find-and-ferry” task in a dynamic warehouse environment.
Mobile Manipulation with MoveIt 2
10:00 - 14:00 CDT Mark Moll(PickNik Robotics) Website This workshop will provide a hands-on introduction to MoveIt 2. Participants will learn how to plan motions for a mobile manipulator. No prior ROS 2 or MoveIt 2 experience is necessary, but basic familiarity with core robotics concepts is assumed. The participants can follow along on their own computers, but they will also have opportunities to plan and execute motions on real hardware: two Stretch mobile manipulators from Hello Robot will be available for experiments. The presenters will cover use and trade-offs of different strategies for motion planning approaches, inverse kinematics, grasping, trajectory generation, and integration with a perception pipeline.
14:00
DAY 1: 10/20/2021
All times are UTC-5 (US Central Daylight Time)
9:30 CDT
Opening Remarks
Kat Scott
9:40 CDT
Keynote
Kimberly Hambuchen
Kimberly Hambuchen is the Chief of the Robotic Systems Technology Branch at NASA Johnson Space Center🌐 More Info
🎥 Watch
10:20 CDT
Break
10:40 CDT
Indy Autonomous Challenge Racing ROS 2 $1M Prize
Josh Whitley, Joe Speed
**Indy Autonomous Challenge** (IAC) deep dive, talking about university students **racing 10 of these million dollar ROS 2 Indy racecars head-to-head for $1M cash prize**. They race at up to 185 mph / 300 km/h at Indy Motor Speedway October 23rd and livestreamed at ROScon. Learn how the 40 IAC universities use and contribute to the open source IAC "base software" autonomous racing stack of Open Robotics ROS 2 with Autoware, Eclipse CycloneDDS w iceoryx and Zenoh V2X on Ubuntu.🌐 More Info
🎥 Watch
11:00 CDT
SMACC2, an open-source, event-driven, asynchronous, behavioral state machine library for ROS2 applications written in C++
Brett Aldrich, Pablo Inigo Blasco
Introducing SMACC2, an open-source, event-driven, asynchronous, behavioral state machine library for ROS2 applications written in C++. SMACC2, along with its predecessor SMACC, opens new possibilities for complex robot task management by giving users the tools to create state machines with features such as hierarchy, orthogonals, clients, client behaviors, state reactors, advanced recovery behaviors and compile time validation that enables a very systematic, efficient and powerful method for programming robot applications. The current maintainer of SMACC is RobosoftAI, the makers of the SMACC Viewer for ROS 1 and the SMACC Runtime Analyzer for ROS2.🎥 Watch
11:20 CDT
rospy2: Convert a ROS1 node to ROS2 by changing only one line of code
Dheera Venkatraman
rospy2 is a Python library that behaves like ROS1's rospy but speaks ROS2 in the background, allowing for easy code migration of simple ROS nodes by changing only one line of code. I will demonstrate a few examples of useful converted ROS nodes, ROS nodes that work in both ROS1 and ROS2 using the same code, and touch upon the challenges and limitations of this approach.🌐 More Info
🎥 Watch
11:30 CDT
Break
11:40 CDT
Panel: From Academia to Start Up
Charlie Kemp (Co-Founder Hello Robot)
Andrea Thomaz (CEO Diligent)
Conor McGinn (CEO Akara Robotics)
Brian Gerkey - Moderator
It is increasingly common for academic roboticists to step away from the university to start companies, often building on technology that they and their labs developed. What does it take to make this transition successful? How does an academic background prepare you (or not) for the challenges of funding, managing, and leading a company? Join us as our panelists share their hard-won lessons about the leap from the ivory tower.
🎥 Watch
12:10 CDT
Lunch
12:20 CDT
Hello Robot: Democratizing Mobile Manipulation with ROS
Applications 12:20 - 12:40 CDTBinit Shah, Aaron Edsinger, Charlie Kemp
Hello Robot presents the Stretch RE1, a compact, lightweight, and capable mobile manipulator for indoor human environments. This talk will cover the story of Stretch, the growing community and ecosystem around the platform, and the role of ROS with an emphasis on ROS 2. We will provide examples of ways universities, startups, and large companies are using Stretch, including research on assistance for people with disabilities. Notably, Hello Robot’s code for Stretch is primarily in Python and all of it is open source on GitHub, including the firmware, so attendees will be able see the code for themselves.🌐 More Info
micro-ROS - New client library and middleware features
Embedded 12:20 - 12:40 CDTRalph Lange, Jan Staschulat, Jaime Martin Losa, Pablo Garrido Sanchez, Maria Merlan Rodriguez
This presentation gives an overview of the many new features added to the micro-ROS client library and middleware in the last months. In particular, we demonstrate (1.) the use of Micro XRCE-DDS interface for custom transports, (2.) the micro-ROS diagnostics package and the integration with ROS 2 diagnostics, (3.) and the worker concept for execution management in the C client library rclc. Already interested? Head to micro.ros.org.🌐 More Info
🎥 Watch
12:40 CDT
Challenges for ROS2 in Autonomous Agricultural Applications
Applications 12:40 - 13:00 CDTMatthew Sebastian
Agriculture provides a perfect opportunity for the use of robotics and autonomous systems as a force multiplier in all scales of operations, but also presents a number of interesting challenges.This presentation covers the lessons and challenges learned over a number of commercial projects using a ROS2 software stack. Specific challenges include the choice of compute platforms, hardware and sensor needs, navigation and localization, and real time control integration.
🌐 More Info
Tracing ROS 2 with ros2_tracing
Embedded 12:40 - 13:10 CDTChristophe Bédard
This talk will introduce tracing, a way to extract execution information, and LTTng, a low-overhead kernel & user space tracer. Then we'll present ros2_tracing, a collection of tools that includes instrumentation directly in the ROS 2 core as well as tools to easily configure tracing through a launch action and a `ros2 trace` command. We'll explain how the instrumentation was designed and show how to use the tools in your own project. Finally, we'll talk about analyzing the trace data and present a demo.🌐 More Info
🎥 Watch
13:00 CDT
USAFABOT: A Testbed for Undergraduate Robotics Education
Applications 13:00 - 13:10 CDTMajor Steven Beyer, Colonel Brian Neff, PhD
This talk presents a novel testbed and curriculum for undergraduate robotics education and research. USAFBOT is designed from off-the-shelf components and employs the Robotics Operating System (ROS) creating great potential for scaling to larger or smaller research applications. Unlike other ROS enabled robots, USAFABOT can be used throughout an entire robotics program, in both introductory and upper-level courses. The utility and relevance of USAFABOT is proven through its use in five courses and four research efforts. The testbed aims to increase motivation and decrease attrition in engineering programs by enabling hands-on robotics experience at all levels of undergraduate education.🌐 More Info
13:10 CDT
Tales from the Actual Field: Trials and Tribulations of rolling out a Robotic Fleet
13:10 - 13:30 CDTDavid Jensen and Evan Davies
What we learned at Greenzie rolling out robotic workers (running ROS) in the field.🌐 More Info
ESP32 microcontroller robot with Navigation 2 ROS 2 running in the Cloud
Embedded 13:10 - 13:30 CDTJack Pien
For roboticists looking to combine the the advancements of cloud compute with the use of cheap microcontrollers such as the ESP32, RP2040, Arduino family of ATMEGAs, we demonstrate a novel way of running a ROS 2 Navigation 2 (ie, Nav2) system in the Cloud (on AWS RobotMaker) to control a sub-$200 ESP32-based differential drive robot. Our approach involves using the ros2-web-bridge “agent” system. In addition to showcasing the details of our approach, we will also talk about its advantages and disadvantages, inviting the participants to collaborate on future design improvements.🌐 More Info
🎥 Watch
13:30 CDT
A ROS-based Driver and Support Stack for the KUKA’s KMR iiwa Mobile Manipulator
Applications 13:30 - 13:40 CDTHatem Fakhruldeen, David Marquez-Gamez, Andy Cooper
In this talk, we present our complete open-source ROS1 stack for the KMR iiwa mobile manipulator. This stack is comprised of a ROSJava driver running natively on the platform controller and accompanying ROS1 packages that allow to use the platform with standard ROS packages as Moveit, Navigation stack, RViz and Gazebo simulation. We will describe the stack’s features, provided ROS1 packages and the driver’s software architecture. Furthermore, to illustrate the stack’s operations, video demos will be shown of the platform using the developed stack to run in single and multi-robot example applications in the context of chemistry lab automation.🌐 More Info
Micro-ROS goes easy: Developing professional applications using Eclipse based IDEs
Embedded 13:30 - 13:40 CDTMaria Merlan, Jaime Martin
micro-ROS is the official ROS 2 framework for MCUs. The mission is bridging the gap between resource-constrained MCUs and larger processors in robotic applications that are based on ROS 2. eProsima presents how micro-ROS is ramping up towards industrial adoptions, by seamless integration in professional IDE for embedded development.The attendees will learn about the first industry-oriented adoption: a Renesas RA6M5 & e2studio based micro-ROS solution. This HW & SW combo solution provides a comprehensive workflow that covers from software development to on-chip debugging, tracing and emulation.This major achievement optimizes the SW development cycle and reduces the solutions time-to-market.🌐 More Info
🎥 Watch
13:40 CDT
Break
13:40 CDT
Break
14:00 CDT
Corvus One: Persistent Aerial Autonomy in the Wild with ROS and PX4
Up, Up and Away 14:00 - 14:30 CDTMohammed Kabir
Corvus Robotics’ fleet of indoor drones are currently the only aerial robots in the world capable of persistent, infrastructure-free autonomous operation in large-scale industrial environments for months on end. In this talk, we’ll share our experience of building and deploying a purely vision-based aerial robotics stack with ROS and PX4 Autopilot at its core. We’ll talk about the architecture, performance and sensing requirements for building a safety-critical system operating around humans, other robots and heavy machinery. We’ll also share our learnings from putting open-source frameworks into production, and ways they do well or fall short.🌐 More Info
Middleware interconnecting ROS/ROS2 with the EtherCAT protocol
Networking & Communications 14:00 - 14:20 CDTAristotelis Papatheodorou, Athanasios Mastrogeorgiou, Konstantinos Machairas, Konstantinos Koutsoukis, Evangelos Papadopoulos
Advancements in robotics and automation point out the need for a highly reliable software infrastructure, capable of deterministic performance. At ROSCon ‘21, the Legged Robots Team of NTUA presents: (a) the ether_ros package, the development of which was outlined in the previous year’s ROS World, (b) the ether_ros2 variant, a middle-ware interconnecting EtherCAT with ROS2, utilizing many of its real-time features. To the best of knowledge, it is the first time that a wrapper of a kernel-space EtherCAT master is presented as a complete package to the ROS Community, delivering deterministic performance tested at 3KHz.🌐 More Info
🎥 Watch
Build and Manage Cloud-enhanced ROS Robots with AWS IoT Greengrass 2.0
Networking & Communications 14:20 - 14:30 CDTJeremy Wallace
In this session, we introduce a new way to use the cloud for managing and running ROS applications on production robot fleets using AWS IoT Greengrass 2.0, an open-source edge run-time for building, managing and deploying device software. When combined with the industry-grade tools, libraries, and capabilities of the Robot Operating System 2 (ROS2), developers can use this approach to bring new cloud-enhanced robot features to market, and reduce the time and effort required to build failure resilient over-the-air (OTA) deployment infrastructure.🌐 More Info
🎥 Watch
14:30 CDT
Driving Autonomy in Mobile Robotics with ROS2 and PX4
Up, Up and Away 14:30 - 14:50 CDTMarkus Achtelik, Nuno Marques, Bastian Jäger
As evangelists of open source, Auterion strives to interact in a most simplistic and comprehensive/intuitive way between ROS2 and PX4.In this talk we will present the micro-RTPS bridge, an direct communication path between ROS2 and PX4. We will
- have a quick look what is under the hood,
- show some freely available, easy to use, simple examples how to interact with the PX4 flight controller from the ROS2 universe and
- present an Auterion custom application (obstacle avoidance) utilizing this technology in customer products
Integrating ROS 2 with existing DDS networks
Networking & Communications 14:30 - 14:50 CDTChris Lalancette, Jessica Herman
The default middleware that ROS 2 uses is DDS by the OMG group. One benefit to using a standard like DDS is that there is the opportunity to integrate ROS 2 with existing DDS networks. This talk will discuss a real-world DDS network that would like to integrate with ROS 2, and how integration works today. It will also discuss areas of future development in ROS 2 that will make integration easier.🎥 Watch
14:50 CDT
VIPER: Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover
Up, Up and Away 14:50 - 15:10 CDTJacob Perron
We will review the technical components of the NASA lunar rover mission, VIPER, with a focus on software components that rely on ROS 2 and Gazebo. We’ll start with an overview of the hardware and software components. Next, we’ll explore some of the custom Gazebo plugins for simulating the rover and the lunar surface. We’ll describe a fault injection framework that was built on ROS 2 parameters and how it is used to simulate hardware faults. Finally, we’ll see how ROS 2 is used as part of the rover ground software.🌐 More Info
Superfast Subsystem Cooperation, A ROS Centric Database System
Networking & Communications 14:50 - 15:10 CDTDavid Vaskevitch, Josh Whitley
Coordinating lots of components and subsystems is a critical problem in ROS. Sharing common data is not easy and performance is a bear. Gaia solves the problem in two important dimensions through an in memory shared database. The database makes it easy to construct and maintain a shared view of the world around an autonomous machine. Not only does the database live in memory; it also provides copy free access to data. As a result subsystems can interoperate totally in real time. The system is designed to be complement and extend the ROS message passing framework cleanly and elegantly.🌐 More Info
🎥 Watch
15:10 CDT
Break
15:10 CDT
Break
15:30 CDT
Multi-Sensor Alignment Package
Perception 15:30 - 16:00 CDTCharles Ellison, Steven Bunkley
Fusion of data from multiple sensors requires precisely matching the perspective of each sensor on the robot to the transforms used to merge the data. These sensor alignments (extrinsic calibration) can be time-consuming to perform. The multi-sensor alignment package presented in this work fills this gap by delivering tools to create an alignment joint for each sensor. The alignment joint includes a dynamic param server to rapidly adjust a sensor’s position and orientation during live operation. Further, the adjusted positions can be saved and automatically loaded on subsequent launches of the node.🌐 More Info
Chronicles of Caching and Containerising CI for Nav2
CI & Deployment 15:30 - 16:00 CDTRuffin White
This talk presents a case study in accelerating continuous integration for one of the largest capability libraries in ROS 2, Nav2. While both mature and promising solutions exist, such as the community build farm, ROS Industrial CI, we experimented with a customized yet templated approach: exploring the limits in speed and efficiency, leveraging new caching and container techniques, utilizing only the free public tier CI services. In addition to analyzing Nav2’s CI performance, we discuss lessons learned, pros/cons of each CI provider, and showcase two new resulting colcon extensions while demonstrating container development strategies for ROS projects.🌐 More Info
🎥 Watch
16:00 CDT
fuse: A graph-based sensor fusion framework
Perception 16:00 - 16:20 CDTStephen Williams
Virtually every autonomous robot performs state estimation, inferring its current position based on sensor measurements. Despite the near-universal need, commonly used ROS packages like robot_localization operate with a fixed state definition, assumed motion model, and limited sensor support. The `fuse` framework brings a graph-based approach to ROS sensor fusion, providing an extensible solution to state estimation. `fuse` allows users to develop custom sensor and motion models and create additional state variables as needed. This talk introduces the `fuse` framework, discusses its benefits and costs, and walks through tutorials for configuring a robot and developing a sensor plugin.🌐 More Info
Say goodbye to flakiness in your integration tests
CI & Deployment 16:00 - 16:20 CDTAlban Tamisier, Michael Pöhnl
Have you ever felt the pain of having flaky integration tests? Yes, the tests that make sure a pedestrian is detected and successfully avoided by your car. The same tests that everybody looks at to know how soon your L4 autonomous car will be ready to hit the road. This talk introduces an execution model combined with a coordinating node that together ensuredeterministic execution of your tests. In other words, your tests won’t fail because they are running in parallel on shared hardware like a CI or resource constraint ECUs.
🎥 Watch
16:20 CDT
A New Way to Interact with PointCloud2 Messages
Perception 16:20 - 16:30 CDTIgor Bogoslavskyi, Dejan Pangercic
The current way to read and modify PointCloud2 messages is to use the PointCloud2Iterator and PointCloud2Modifier classes. These classes are very flexible, but also error prone as the user must guarantee that the fields put into the message are exactly the ones being read from it. In this talk, we present an alternative class PointCloudMsgWrapper]available as open-source and on the ROS 2 build farm) that alleviates this issue. It guarantees that the data is written and read in exactly the same way. We show how this class can be used, and guide the user through some implementation details.🌐 More Info
Boot to ROS in 7 seconds (and auto update)
CI & Deployment 16:20 - 16:30 CDTCharles Quinn
From power on to ROS in 7 seconds with automatic updates. We'll show how our robots in the field do it using open source tooling, a minimal kernel, and good ole apt.🌐 More Info
🎥 Watch
16:30 CDT
ROS 2 Grasp Library – Acceleration for 3D Object Pose Detection
Perception 16:30 - 16:50 CDTSharron LIU, Harold YANG
In ROSCon 2019, OpenVINO toolkit was introduced to accelerate deep learning based robotic vision algorithms. However, traditional algorithms are still generally used in many robotic systems.This time, we introduce oneAPI Toolkit to accelerate 3D object pose detection in Point Cloud Library and nearest neighbors searching in FLANN. The acceleration results are verified on the integrated GPU of Intel’s Gen 11 Core platform with parallel processing units. The example application for bolt pose detection and picking is available in the open source project ROS2 Grasp Library.
🌐 More Info
RoboStack - cross-platform ROS packages for science, the cloud and Windows
CI & Deployment 16:30 - 16:40 CDTWolf Vollprecht
The RoboStack project is creating conda packages for ROS. Conda packages are widely used in data science, biology, physics and many other scientific domains. The ROS conda packages work on Windows, macOS and most Linux distributions and reproduce an experience similar to Ubuntu's apt-get on these platforms. Furthermore, virtual environments are natively supported, and version pinning in environments can help with reproducible science. We will also show our build tools and how to use them to properly bundle up a ROS application to ship it to customers.🌐 More Info
🎥 Watch
16:50 CDT
Break
17:10 CDT
17:30 CDT
Virtual Reception
DAY 2: 10/21/2021
All times are UTC-5 (US Central Daylight Time)
9:30 CDT
9:40 CDT
Day 2 Keynote
Angela Schoellig
Recent research from the Dynamic Systems Lab, University of Toronto.🌐 More Info
🎥 Watch
10:20 CDT
Break
10:40 CDT
ros2_control: The future of ros_control
Bence Magyar, Denis Štogl, Victor Lopez, Jordan Palacios, Luca Marchionni, Karsten Knese
ros2_control is a robot-agnostic control framework with a focus on both real-time performance and sharing of controllers. The framework offers controller lifecycle and hardware resource management, as well as abstractions on hardware interfaces.Controllers expose ROS interfaces for 3rd party solutions to robotics problems like manipulation path planning (`moveit2`) and autonomous navigation (`nav2`). The modular design makes it ideal for both research and industrial use. A robot made up of a mobile base and an arm that supports ros2_control needs no extra code, only a few controller configuration files and it is ready to go.
🌐 More Info
🎥 Watch
11:10 CDT
Let's Roll! How ROS 2 Rolling Ridley changes the ROS release process and what you can do with it.
Steven! Ragnarök
ROS 2 Rolling Ridley is the first rolling distribution of ROS. This talk will cover how Rolling Ridley improves the release process for new distributions by removing the need to bootstrap each distribution one release at a time, how it makes it easier for package maintainers who release their packages into the Rolling distribution to ensure their packages will be available in future ROS releases, and how it enables the ROS community to try major new changes to ROS packages as soon as they are ready.🎥 Watch
11:30 CDT
ROS in the Wild: Surviving the First 100 Systems
Carter Schultz
AMP Robotics has created an industrial recycling sorting system with ROS at its core. We've now deployed more than 100 systems across three continents, and faced our share of challenges along the way. This talk is a survival guide on how to take a prototype to production, and challenges of scaling with ROS.🌐 More Info
🎥 Watch
11:50 CDT
12:00 CDT
Lunch
12:20 CDT
Hybrid Planning - Enabling Reactive Manipulation with MoveIt 2
Manipulation 12:20 - 12:50 CDTHenning Kayser, Sebastian Jahr
Traditionally, MoveIt’s motion planning pipeline follows the “Sense-Plan-Act” approach, where “Sense” is the initial perception of robot state and world, “Plan” the one-off computation of a global collision-free trajectory, and “Act” the execution of the trajectory with a single controller request. While this approach works well for static environments, it doesn’t allow reacting to changes in the world, sensor feedback, or new goals during execution.The new Hybrid Planning architecture for MoveIt 2 addresses this limitation. A pair of global and local planners continuously evaluate, compute and execute motion plans, enabling support for online adaptive and reactive robot motions.🌐 More Info
Apex.OS Cert: Taking ROS 2 from prototype into production
Vehicles 12:20 - 12:50 CDTKyle Marcey
What does it mean for software to be safe? Can ROS 2 be used in real-time production applications? Learn the answers to these questions and more as we take you through the ISO 26262 safety certification process and the lessons learned along the way. In this talk, we will show you the 13 steps that went into the certification of each package in Apex.OS (many of which are from ROS 2) and explain how we address some of the biggest challenges in developing safe, deterministic C++ including memory allocation, threading, and exception handling.🌐 More Info
🎥 Watch
12:50 CDT
Tesseract Motion Planning Framework
Manipulation 12:50 - 13:10 CDTLevi Armstrong, Michael Ripperger
Southwest Research Institute has been developing and deploying Scan-N-Plan applications over the past several years and to support these deployments a motion planning framework was developed to simplify the use for non-software developers and provide a flexible framework for developers to create custom process planners. The framework is separated into four key areas Command Language, Motion Planners, Process Planners, and Meta Planner. The talk provides an overview of the key areas along with how they are used to generate motion trajectories for common industrial applications like inspection, sanding, painting, and grinding with a simulation of a representative industrial grinding workcell.🌐 More Info
Project ABSOLUT - Autonomous Public Transportation Service in Leipzig, Germany
Vehicles 12:50 - 13:10 CDTGeorg Beierlein, Christian Schroer
We introduce the project ABSOLUT where an ambitious group of partners from industry, public-sector andacademia set out to develop an on-demand autonomous shuttle bus for the city of Leipzig, Germany.
With ROS at its core and almost three years of joint development, we talk about our key learnings
regarding systems design, software and hardware integration and functional safety. We also look at
the new regulatory framework for autonomous vehicles (AV) in Germany, our path to receiving a
vehicle road license and take a look at driving permission in collaboration with government bodies and its
implications for using ROS and ROS2 in commercial AV applications.
🌐 More Info
🎥 Watch
13:10 CDT
Making a robot ROS 2 powered - a case study using the UR manipulators
Manipulation 13:10 - 13:30 CDTDenis Štogl, Nathan Brooks, Lovro Ivanov, Andy Zelenak, Rune Søe-Knudsen
With the release of ros2_control and MoveIt 2, ROS 2 Foxy finally has all the “ingredients” needed to power a robot with similar features as in ROS 1. We present the driver for Universal Robot’s manipulators as a real-world example of how robots can be run using ROS 2. We show how to realize multi-interface support for position and velocity commands in the driver and how to support scaling controllers while respecting factors set on the teach pendant. Finally, we show how this real-world example influences development of ros2_control to support non-joint related inputs and outputs in its real-time control loop.🌐 More Info
V2X enabled Cooperative Driving Automation with USDOT CARMA Platform
Vehicles 13:10 - 13:30 CDTMichael McConnell
Automated Driving Systems (ADS) continue to be a hot topic in the ROS community, but what comes next? The answer is cooperation and coordination between ADS systems and infrastructure. This talk will describe how the CARMA Program uses existing technologies to enable Cooperative Driving Automation (CDA). We will discuss how CARMA implemented its vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications stack in ROS and built upon Autoware.ai to enable CDA operations such as platooning, and dynamic route updates.🌐 More Info
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13:30 CDT
Online Trajectory Generation and Admittance Control in ROS2
Manipulation 13:30 - 13:40 CDTAndy Zelenak, Denis Stogl
One of the top reasons to upgrade from ROS1 to ROS2 is better suitability for realtime tasks. We discuss the development of a new ROS2 controller to handle realtime contact tasks such as tool insertion with industrial robots. The admittance controller handles trajectories and single-waypoint streaming commands, making it compatible with MoveIt and many teleoperation frameworks. Part of the work involved ensuring kinematic limits (position/velocity/acceleration/jerk) are obeyed while limiting interaction forces with the environment. Finally, we give practical recommendations and examples of the admittance controller. A live demo will be shown at our booth.🌐 More Info
Using ROS for AMR interoperability
Vehicles 13:30 - 13:50 CDTMiguel Garcia, Julian Cerruti
This talk will explore the challenges faced when operating heterogeneous fleets of robots in real world scenarios. These applications typically require efficiently orchestrating robots from different vendors that coexist while carrying out a variety of tasks.The presentation will include a review of the value of interoperability and current initiatives, like VDA5050, MassRobotics AMR Interoperability Standard and Open-RMF, focusing on the implications for the ROS community. Finally, new packages that allow developers to make robots standard-compliant using almost zero code will be demonstrated.
The goal is to raise awareness and help accelerate the adoption of robotics in complex environments.
🎥 Watch
13:40 CDT
Machine assembly with ROS and multiple robot arms.
Manipulation 13:40 - 13:50 CDTFelix von Drigalski
We present a set of ROS packages to assemble machine parts using a multi-arm system, which were running the system of Team O2AC at the World Robot Summit 2020 Assembly Challenge. We show how to perform useful object manipulation, increase reliability under noisy perception, load parts into MoveIt, and we share lessons learned during development.🌐 More Info
13:50 CDT
Break
13:50 CDT
Break
14:10 CDT
Autonomous Driving for the Largest High School Robotics Competition
Navigation 14:10 - 14:40 CDTYashas Ambati, Gabe Hart, Sahil Bhatia, Diya Nerurkar, Kevin Jaget, Marshall Massengill
For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology FIRST, is an international organization focused on engaging students in STEM. This year, our team—The Zebracorns—focused on implementing autonomous driving, bringing us one step closer towards fielding the first fully-autonomous robot in the high-school level of FIRST: FIRST Robotics Competition FRC. In this presentation, we’ll discuss how ROS has enabled us to construct our autonomous driving pipeline, the specific approach we took within the context of FRC, the motivation for this approach, and our vision for the future of our automation stack.🌐 More Info
VSCode, Docker and ROS2
Developers 14:10 - 14:30 CDTAllison Thackston
Learn how to quick-start your ROS2 development with VSCode and Docker. I this talk I’ll share the tips, tricks, and hacks that I use to develop ROS2 projects.🌐 More Info
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ROS 2 Content Filtered Topics
Developers 14:30 - 14:40 CDTJaime Martin Losa, Tomoya Fujita
Until now, ROS 2 didn’t include a way to filter the contents of a topic, and a listener should receive all the updates of a given topic. There are many cases where the listener wants to get just a subset of the published samples, and this new feature will allow it, **saving bandwidth and simplifying the application logic**. In this talk we will present the new feature and a simple **demo** on how to use it.🎥 Watch
14:40 CDT
RMF based multi-robot traffic management application use case
Navigation 14:40 - 14:50 CDTDaniel Park, Lucy Kwon, Paul Kim
We are developing a traffic management software package based on RMF proposed by OSRF. With the non-face-to-face situation due to the COVID-19, cases of using multiple mobile robots in various fields are increasing like warehouses, hospitals, and so on. However, it is difficult to control multiple robots without collisions or deadlocks when robots share the common narrow space where only one robot can pass through. In this situation, the robots recognize each other as obstacles, resulting in a deadlock problem. To solve this problem, we have researched and developed a traffic management software package that can be applied to RMF Core.🌐 More Info
BaggetFilter
Developers 14:40 - 14:50 CDTPaul Buzaud, Prashant Ganesh, Humberto Ramos, Kevin Brink
Presentation of a Qt GUI tool that allows manipulating rosbags in a user-friendly way. It allows you to export any topics into CSV files, filter the useful ones (including tf) into a lightweight rosbag, and modify timestamps with only a few clicks . On top of that, this tool can play rosbag with all the different rosbag arguments and doesn’t need any dependencies.🌐 More Info
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14:50 CDT
Towards Assured Autonomy with ROS
Navigation 14:50 - 15:10 CDTPatrick Musau, Taylor T. Johnson, Diego Manzanas Lopez, Nathaniel Hamilton
Over the last decade tremendous advances in technology have been made in constructing autonomous systems as evidenced by proliferation of a wide range of air, ground, and underwater vehicles. Despite these advances, adoption of such systems in safety-critical settings remains challenging due to the difficulty of developing rigorous techniques for establishing confidence in the behavior of these systems. In this talk, we will present how ROS and Gazebo are enabling the development of safety assurance tools for autonomous systems, and how these methods are being applied to a 1/10 scale open-source autonomous racing platform known as the F1Tenth.🌐 More Info
Rosbag2 for Power Users
Developers 14:50 - 15:10 CDTEmerson Knapp, Adam Dąbrowski
rosbag2 is a more flexible tool than the original rosbag - with new ways to use and extend it that users are likely not yet familiar with. This talk outlines rosbag2's high level architecture and extension points with a plugin-writing demonstration, how to evaluate bag performance for application developers and plugin writers, and a brief discussion of the latest features and upcoming roadmap.🌐 More Info
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15:10 CDT
Break
15:10 CDT
Break
15:30 CDT
We Have Ignition: The Next Generation of Gazebo Simulation
Simulation 15:30 - 15:50 CDTMichael Carroll, Jenn Nguyen
Ignition Gazebo is the latest generation of Gazebo, a simulator that is widely popular with ROS users. Gazebo was rearchitected to provide a complete toolbox of modular development libraries which makes simulation more powerful and easy. With a second LTS release, Ignition is ready to be adopted by the ROS community, whether migrating from previous versions or starting from scratch. This talk will introduce the components of the simulator, cover application areas, and highlight features that are crucial to the ROS community. The talk will also cover ROS integration best practices so that developers can incorporate simulation in their workflows.🌐 More Info
Foxglove Studio: Imagining the Next Generation of ROS Visualization
Interfaces 15:30 - 16:00 CDTAdrian Macneil, Esther Weon
High-quality visualizations are critical to developing the next generation of robotic systems. However, the current tooling landscape is fragmented – applications often don’t prioritize ease of cross-platform deployment, team collaboration, and integration with bag data storage systems.At Cruise, we responded to this need for more flexible tooling with Webviz, a ROS data visualization tool. Foxglove Studio is a continuation of that vision for better open source ROS tooling.
Join us as we discuss how Studio is accelerating robotics development today, and how we can reimagine the next generation of ROS visualization together.
🌐 More Info
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15:50 CDT
Wet Wet Wet and Under Pressure: Underwater Sensor Simulation
Simulation 15:50 - 16:00 CDTMabel Zhang, Ben Raanan, Brian Bingham, Woen-Sug Choi, Derek Olson
Marine robotics simulation is in its elementary stages, and the community stands to benefit from a holistic simulation toolchain, of which abundant options exist for dry land. Underwater simulation poses unique challenges, including but not limited to hydrodynamics, perception, and physical and chemical properties of water important for both research and field experiments. In this talk, motivated by real-world field applications, we highlight an array of simulated acoustic sensors and science sensors that measure water properties. Exercised in basic underwater environments in Ignition and Gazebo, they are a small but pertinent step toward the grand wish of a comprehensive simulation.16:00 CDT
Using NVIDIA Isaac Sim For Synthetic Data Generation & ROS Development
Simulation 16:00 - 16:20 CDTHammad Mazhar
This talk will demonstrate how Isaac Sim, a robotics simulation and synthetic data generation tool developed by NVIDIA, can be used to simulate three different ROS/ROS2-driven workflows: manipulation of an articulated robot arm using MoveIt; multi-robot warehouse navigation with mobile bases; and photo-realistic synthetic data generation using the Omniverse RTX renderer. We will discuss details of the Isaac Sim-ROS/ROS2 integration, native ROS/ROS2 python support and how to connect your existing robots, software stacks and environments into Isaac Sim.🌐 More Info
Augmented Reality and Robotics
Interfaces 16:00 - 16:20 CDTLou Amadio, Stuart Schaefer
Augmented Reality and Robotics are a natural fit. AR technology provides spatially relevant UI and interaction models for real - or even “virtual” robots. In this presentation, we will show how to create spatial UI which directly interacts with ROS2 based robots.🌐 More Info
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16:20 CDT
Modeling sensors for simulation of ROS applications in Unity
Simulation 16:20 - 16:40 CDTHamid Younesy
In this talk you will learn how to model high-fidelity sensors for robotics simulation in ROS (1 & 2) applications using Unity. You will learn about a variety of sensor types with different noise models, how they communicate with ROS, and how to debug them using Unity’s visualization framework. We will walk through the simulation of an end-to-end, closed-loop control scenario that utilizes several sensor types, including an IMU, LiDAR, RGB camera, and RGB-D camera. We will also compare algorithms and ROS packages for object detection, localization, and state estimation using the sensory data under various settings and noise models.🌐 More Info
ALICA - A Language for Interactive Cooperative Agents
Interfaces 16:20 - 16:50 CDTAbhishek Sharma, Stephan Opfer
The ALICA Framework is an open source multi-agent coordination framework that originates from the highly dynamic domain of robotic soccer. We, at Rapyuta Robotics, are currently the main contributors, but we seek for others to benefit from this framework as well. Therefore, our talk will enable the listeners to graphically model multi-agent behaviours and live debug those behaviours independent from the location of the deployed agents. All this will be demonstrated with a warehouse automation use case, including two forklifts and an AGV.🌐 More Info
🎥 Watch
16:40 CDT
Generating Parametrized Simulated Worlds with AWS RoboMaker WorldForge
Simulation 16:40 - 17:00 CDTJacquelyn De Sa
Simulation testing can help make robotics development faster, safer, and higher-quality. Building virtual worlds is required to test robotics applications in simulation, and the process can require months of time and substantial expense for robotics companies. In this session, we will walk you through how to use AWS RoboMaker WorldForge to simplify the process of getting a Gazebo-based dynamic simulation world up and running in AWS RoboMaker Simulation Jobs or your local Gazebo workflow. Attend this session to learn how you can accelerate world creation, so you can shift more testing to simulation environments to increase your testing velocity, and expand your test coverage to improve your robotics application quality.AugRe: an Augmented Reality tool for supervising, coordinating, and commanding robotic agents
Interfaces 16:50 - 16:50 CDTCan Pehlivanturk, Maxwell Svetlik, Christina Petlowany, Corrie Van Sice, Mitch Pryor
Augmented reality provides an exciting way to transmit robot supplied data to provide users with improved situational awareness. When given an alert from a monitored fleet of robots, the user simply looks around to find where that robot is with no need to match a GUI or map to the environment. Targets identified by robots can be seen in their global location or viewed from the robot's perspective. We use a Microsoft HoloLens2 to transmit data from ROS topics to the user using an architecture to transmit data for any number of robots, other operators, and identified targets.🌐 More Info
🎥 Watch
17:00 CDT
Break
17:20 CDT
Panel: Simulation Tools for ROS
Louise Poubel
Liila Torabi
Steve Hansen
Ryan Gariepy - Moderator
"A decade ago, robot simulators were things graduate students wrote on their own because decent robots were prohibitively expensive. Now, even though robots are more accessible than ever, the need for simulation in robotics R&D has only grown. Join developers of some of the world's largest robotics simulation products in a discussion about the past, present, and future of simulation."
🎥 Watch
17:50 CDT
CFP
As of July 9th, 2021. Workshop and Talk Submissions are Now Closed
As previously announced, ROS World 2021 will be held online, October 20th and 21st, 2021. The core of the conference is (and always has been) content from the community, and this year, we’re looking for proposals for three different types of content.
Workshops: As in 2019, we will offer workshops on Day 0 of the conference. The goal of the workshops is to provide space for participatory/interactive experiences between the presenter(s) and the attendees and the chance to go more in depth into a subject than a regular talk could allow.
Talks: The standard presentation format is the talk, with the presenter(s) talking live about a specific topic, with a brief question period at the end, fitting into a 10, 20 or 30 minute time slot.
Videos: At a later time frame, we will be soliciting submissions for videos (following the deluge of submissions to ROS World 2020). Submissions will be opened after notifications for standard talks goes out, so that everyone can have a chance to present topics that are not yet included in the program.
We are also planning panels, keynote speakers and of course, lightning talks. The conference program will be a combination of single-track and multitrack.
Event Attendance
Due to the historic Covid-19 outbreak in New Orleans ROSCon 2021 has been forced to move online and become ROS World. Speakers will have the option to pre-record their talks or do them as part of the ROSCon livestream. If your talk has been selected by the ROSCon program committee a member of our team will reach out to coordinate speaking arrangements.
General Content Guidelines:
All topics related to ROS and ROS 2 are invited. Example topics include:
- New packages / frameworks
- Insights / improvements for existing packages
- Case studies on unique ROS deployments / use cases
- Developments for specific robots, sensors, platforms
- Competitions / collaborations / initiatives
- ROS in commercial / research / teaching environments
- Standards / best practices / development tools
To get an idea of the content and tone of ROSCon, check out the slides and videos from previous years. We cannot offer content that is not proposed! If there is a topic on which you would like to present, please propose it. If you have an idea for an important topic that you do not want to present yourself, please post it for discussion on ROS Discourse.
Review Criteria
All submissions will be reviewed by the program committee to evaluate:
- Relevance to the ROS Community - The proposed content should use ROS in a substantial way, but beyond that, the work must also be relevant and compelling to a general ROS audience. Writing a ROS driver for a specific piece of hardware is an excellent contribution to the community, but describing the intricacies of its firmware may not be relevant to this audience. Furthermore, content should be relevant to a global and diverse community.
- Quality of Content/Impact - We encourage proposals to contain big ideas with high impact. Proposals should have a demonstrable quality as opposed to being purely theoretical.
- Quality of Presentation - Articulating your ideas clearly and grammatically is a key prerequisite for giving a compelling live presentation.
- Originality/Novelty - Content should be original and not something that has already been heard before. Will this be the 41st talk on a particular topic at ROSCon? Or are you presenting something new?
- Open Source Availability - Because we are an open-source community, proposals for which the underlying code and other content is available under an open source license have a greater chance of being accepted. It is not a hard requirement, but proposals focused on proprietary systems should contribute in some other way to the community. Promises of future release are difficult to evaluate, so having your content released at the time of proposal submission is preferred.
Additional consideration will be given to balancing the subject matter and duration of presentation. We encourage proposals from presenters of all backgrounds and experience levels.
Workshop Submission Information
Workshop proposals must include:
- Title (maximum 70 characters)
- Presenter(s) (name and affiliation)
- Summary - for public consumption, used in the program schedule (maximum 100 words)
- Description - outline and goals, for review by the program committee. Describe the intended audience and what resources (if any) would be required. Please be sure to include enough information in your proposal for the program committee to evaluate the above review criteria.
Workshop proposals are closed as of May 7th, 2021. The chosen workshops will be published out no later than June 9th, 2021.
Talk Submission Information
Talk proposals must include:
- Title (maximum 70 characters)
- Presenter(s) (name and affiliation)
- Desired talk length (10, 20, or 30 minutes)
- Summary - for public consumption, used in the program schedule (maximum 100 words)
- Description - outline and goals, for review by the program committee. Describe the intended audience and what they can expect to learn. Please be sure to include enough information in your proposal for the program committee to evaluate the above review criteria.
- (NEW) Audio abstract - for review by the program committee. All talk proposals must include a (maximum) one minute recording of the presenter describing the content of the talk. It should be a single-take, responding as if a colleague asked what the talk was about. Please use either the mp3 or ogg file format.
- (NEW) Key URL/Twitter handles - Optionally include a single link/Twitter handles to be associated with talk in publicity materials.
As of July 9th, 2021, the submission window has closed. We are no-longer accepting talks.
Submit these files to the ROSCon 2021 Hot CRP Website. Talk proposals must be submitted by July 9th, 2021. The program will be announced August 17th, 2021.
If you have any questions/comments/firmware patches, please email roscon-2021-oc@openrobotics.org
Program Co-Chairs:
- David Lu!! (PickNik Robotics)
- Melonee Wise (Fetch Robotics)
lightning talks
ROS World Lightning Talks
Lightning talks are one of the most anticipated parts of any conference and they are a great way to get your new package, robot, research, development process, or idea in front of a larger audience. We’re hoping to replicate the ROSCon lighting talks at ROS World again this year (and no, we’re not going to mix them in with commercials again ;) ). Our approach for this year is to allow the community to submit short videos that we use during ROS World. We plan to take approximately the best two dozen or so videos and mash them up into a super cut that will play in between ROS World sessions.
We’re looking for all sorts of videos from the ROS community, and as such we’re open to videos related to any ROS topic you deem appropriate. Got a cool new robot? That’s worth a video. Have a great package that could use a few more maintainers? That’s worth a video. Want to ramble about your software pet-peeve for ninety seconds? Be our guest. Anything goes.
We’re pivoting really quickly between ROSCon and ROS World this year; as such lightning talks are going to come down to the wire. I want to give the following guidance about submitting your videos this year:
General Guidance
- The videos will be reviewed by a team of reviewers from the ROS community.
- We do not collect reviewer feedback and we WILL NOT be able to give you feedback on why your video was not selected.
- Due to time constraints we will not be able to notify you if your video is selected or not.
- We will automatically reject your video if it does not meet our requirements (i.e. too long, wrong format, etc).
- We may use your video content in future projects. By submitting your video you consent to this usage.
- Due to the volume of videos we receive we are not able to replace or modify your video once it has been submitted.
Content Guidance
- Due to time constraints we are not able to answer your questions or workshop your video’s content. Please use your best judgement.
- Keep it pithy. The shorter the videos the more videos we can feature. I can’t stress this enough.
- Use your video to grab the audience’s attention and then tell them where they can find more information.
- Keep it real. We want to see real ROS users solving real problems. We want to see working robots, exciting demos, and informative tirades as much as possible.
- Have fun and make it fun. ROS World is a long day and audience fatigue is real.
- Recording narration over a handful of slides is perfectly fine! Just keep it interesting, short, and informative.
- Last year our guidance to the reviewers was to show preference to, “real robots solving real problems.” Our guidance to the reviewers this year is to show preference to “short, smart, & awesome” videos
- Lightning talks are not a platform for free advertising. Please do not submit your existing marketing video.
We’re still finalizing the details but the parameters for a video submission are as follows:
- Immediately related to ROS and the ROS community
- Less than 120 seconds – keep it pithy
- Format: MP4
- Resolution: 1920 x 1080p (full HD) preferred, minimum 1280 x 720 p
- File size: 500MB - 1GB. Files should not exceed 1GB.
- Audio: Stereo is preferred, mono is acceptable
- Please use a consistent file name of
_ .mp4 - The videos don’t need to be overly produced but they should be short, clear, and to the point.
We’re still finalizing the process and due dates for video submissions but our preliminary due date for videos is in September 29th, 2021 at 11:59pm PST. THERE WILL BE NO EXTENSION AND NO LATE SUBMISSIONS WILL BE ACCEPTED.
D&I
ROS World 2021 Diversity Scholarships
The ROS World 2021 organizing committee aims for ROS World to represent the entire ROS community, which is diverse and global. In addition to promoting technology that is open source, we strive to ensure that our community is as open and accessible as possible. Inclusion and diversity benefit the ROS ecosystem as a whole.
Whoever you are, whatever you do, and wherever you do it, if you’re interested in ROS, then we want you to join us at ROS World. To help reduce financial barriers to conference attendance, the ROSCon Diversity Committee is offering a limited number of scholarships to members of traditionally underrepresented groups in the robotics community. Thanks to the support of the program’s sponsors, each scholarship includes:
- one complimentary conference registration;
- three nights’ hotel accommodation; and
- a travel stipend (limited to those participants whose travel to the conference would otherwise be infeasible).
All other expenses (including any visa requirements) will be the responsibility of the participant.
Please note the following about the scholarship program:
To maximize the impact of scholarship funds, scholarship recipients will be asked to share a room with another recipient. Under special circumstances alternative arrangements can be accommodated.As a special case for ROS World 2021, given the global pandemic, we will not ask scholarship recipients to share hotel rooms.- Participants will be responsible for covering their travel expenses up front. The travel stipend will be provided on-site at the conference.
Eligibility
We invite applications from members of groups that have been traditionally underrepresented in the robotics community, including but not limited to: women, people in LGBTQIA+ communities, people with disabilities, people from racial and/or ethnic minorities in the robotics community, and people from developing nations who may not otherwise be able to attend ROSCon. Previous ROSCon Diversity Scholarship recipients are not eligible to re-apply.
Review Process
The ROS World Diversity Committee reviews applicants according to the following criteria:
- How will the applicant increase the diversity of ROS World?
- How will the applicant contribute to ROS World through their attendance?
- Is the applicant engaged with the ROS community?
The applicants who are reviewed most favorably, subject to available funding, are offered scholarships. We always receive more good applications that we are able to fund. The most common reason for a less favorable review is lack of effort shown in the application, such that we are unable to meaningfully review the candidate. Please take the time to completely and thoughtfully complete the scholarship application.
Impact
We are proud to share the following feedback from past Diversity Scholars:
The ROSCon Diversity Scholarship Program provided me with an opportunity that would have been completely impossible without it. I was able to attend my first robotics conference and feel empowered to keep working to try and make a positive impact on this community. Also, it was very encouraging to see so many companies stepping up to promote and enable diversity within their companies and the robotics community. Thank you!
ROSCon 2017 scholarship participant
ROSCon has been an incredible experience. It is really encouraging to see that everyone in the robotics community is really welcoming and willing to share their expertise. I learned a lot and I met incredible people. This experience inspired and motivated me to contribute more to the robotics community and make a positive impact.
ROSCon 2018 scholarship participant
We also have a blog post of the 2017 Diversity Program.
Diversity Scholars Sponsors
The ROSCon Diversity Scholarship is made possible thanks to sponsor organizations from the ROS community.
If your organization is interested in getting involved in the Diversity Program, please contact us at roscon-2021-oc@openrobotics.org
How to apply
To apply, fill out this form by July 16, 2021, describing how you are involved with ROS and the robotics community, and what you hope to get out of attending ROSCon. Scholarships will be awarded based on a combination of need and impact. Every applicant will be notified of the outcome of their application.
Travel restrictions to the United States
Please note that as of Wednesday, April 7, 2021 travelers who have been physically present in the countries listed on this CDC page may be prohibited from entering the United States. On Wednesday, April 7, 2021 this list includes China, Iran, Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Monaco, San Marino, Vatican City, United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland, Brazil, and South Africa. We encourage everyone to submit a scholarship application and as the conference approaches and the travel situation is updated we will provide further information. This year will also have a live stream to accommodate those who would prefer, or are required, to remain at home.
Past Events
ROSCon has been held annually since 2012. If you’d like to know more we have archives of all the past programs with recordings of the talks and most of the slides. The sites can be found at the locations below.
- ROSCon 2019 Macau
- ROSCon 2018 Madrid, Spain
- ROSCon 2017 Vancouver, Canada
- ROSCon 2016 Seoul, Korea
- ROSCon 2015 Hamburg, Germany
- ROSCon 2014 Chicago, USA
- ROSCon 2013 Stuttgart, Germany
- ROSCon 2012 St. Paul, USA
Code of Conduct
All attendees, speakers, sponsors and volunteers at our conference are required to agree with the following code of conduct. Organisers will enforce this code throughout the event. We expect cooperation from all participants to help ensure a safe environment for everybody.
The Quick Version
Our conference is dedicated to providing a harassment-free conference experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion (or lack thereof), or technology choices. We do not tolerate harassment of conference participants in any form. Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any conference venue, including talks, workshops, parties, Twitter and other online media. Conference participants violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the conference without a refund at the discretion of the conference organizers.
Attendee Health and Safety
New to the Code of Conduct for 2021
With regards to attendee health and safety during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, ROSCon will be following all applicable local public health guidelines in order to provide as safe an environment as possible when meeting in person for ROSCon 2021. This segment of the Code of Conduct may be revised as needed to reflect the latest guidance and is current as of 6/16/2021.
ROSCon encourages attendees to be fully vaccinated prior to arriving onsite at the conference. In addition, the organizers ask that you:
- Follow relevant guidance provided by the World Health Organization (WHO), or your local health authority.
- Adhere to government-issued travel restrictions and guidance issued by the region you will be traveling to and the region you are traveling from (including compliance required by airlines or other travel services).
- Evaluate your own health and that of people you are in close contact with; Contact the ROSCon organizers if you have concerns.
- Stay home if you feel sick and seek medical attention at any time if you feel unwell or are experiencing flu-like symptoms.
- Follow guidance from your local health authority for everyday preventive actions to help the spread of respiratory viruses. For more recommendations, see the CDC’s Covid-19 travel guidelines.
The Less Quick Version
Harassment includes offensive verbal comments related to gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion, technology choices, sexual images in public spaces, deliberate intimidation, stalking, following, harassing photography or recording, sustained disruption of talks or other events, inappropriate physical contact, and unwelcome sexual attention.
Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately.
Sponsors are also subject to the anti-harassment policy. In particular, sponsors should not use sexualised images, activities, or other material. Booth staff (including volunteers) should not use sexualized clothing/uniforms/costumes, or otherwise create a sexualised environment.
If a participant engages in harassing behavior, the conference organisers may take any action they deem appropriate, including warning the offender or expulsion from the conference with no refund.
If you are being harassed, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact a member of conference staff immediately. Conference staff can be identified as they’ll be wearing badges as well as there will be staff at the registration desk.
Conference staff will be happy to help participants contact hotel/venue security or local law enforcement, provide escorts, or otherwise assist those experiencing harassment to feel safe for the duration of the conference. We value your attendance.
We expect participants to follow these rules at conference and workshop venues and conference-related social events.