Personal Notes from ROS World 2020
Update: You can find all of the videos from ROS World 2020 here.
I attended the Robotic Operating System’s ROS World 2020 convention today. I quite enjoyed it! To keep myself focused during the event, I tried to write some comprehensive notes. To keep myself entertained, I wrote them as if somebody else would be reading them.
But it occurred to me that someone else might find these useful in some way, especially if they missed the convention or didn’t know it was a thing, and this might act as a sort of helpful guide. Or maybe you’re just curious about robots and want to see what we’re up to. Either way, I hope this is helpful! I’ll add links to the videos once they’re posted publicly, and will happily answer any questions in the comments.
🔑 Keynote & Q&A - Dr. Vivian Chu, co-founder and CTO of Diligent Robotics¶
Missed the first couple minutes because the stream was acting up.
Good advice on robotics startups
Interesting insight into systemic issues in healthcare and nursing, and how robots might be able to help alleviate that.
Users don’t know what they want
Spotty network connections, even indoors
Q & A Bechdel Test: Two women - Katherine Scott, Developer Advocate from Open Robotics, and Dr. Vivian Chu, CTO of Diligent Robotics. Other founder of Diligent is also a woman.
👍 Panel: Software Quality in Robotics Content¶
Deby Katz - Carnegie Mellon University (Moderator), Allison Thackston - Waymo, Afsoon Afzal Phd Candidate at Carnegie Mellon, Sophia Kolak from Columbia University
So many women speakers! Awesome.
Familiar idea for most devs: automated testing is important
Adversarial situations: robots have to exist in the real world, where things often don’t go to plan.
FIELD TESTING, LOGGING AND PLAYBACK - IMPORTANT
Not as much Automated Testing currently, because it’s hard, but might be helpful to increase
3 Main Challenges:
Testing in the real world (“Unknown unknowns”)
She never actually mentioned the other 2
Sensor noise makes things interesting.
“Degenerate Input”
Lots of dichotomization between pure software like the web and these physical computing concepts.
Documentation for packages are lacking.
Need to reduce friction for writing documentation.
Simulation is critical part of software quality assurance
Why aren’t people using it then?
Using “multiple modalities of testing” can improve testing
Favorite/most interesting bug
Someone found simulated case where robot arm intersected robot body, developers didn’t believe, sure enough: broke robot
Simulators can be wonky: spawn underground, shoot up and collapse in on itself.
Robot kicked human tester so hard they were injured during field testing.
Software testing important for researchers?
Yes (implied duh)
Too many people treat it as an afterthought
Need to make it easy to go from rosbag to structured unit test
The infrastructure and techniques need robustness
First-to-market tends to outweigh safety/quality concerns
Maybe need to introduce standard/certification
Probabalistic Testing, how do we ensure coverage?
Better test platform, increase reproducibility, add fuzziness to try and replicate
Health of the ROS ecosystem
Software Quality/Testing is hidden away in the far corners of specialized CS curriculum
Need to prioritize teaching these tools
Need better tooling
AUTOMATE. THOSE. TOOLS!!!
Standardized Environments for testing - neat!
Best practices?
Lot of familiar stuff from traditional software engineering
How do you style a test environment to do end-to-end testing
Lotta roll-your-own right now
Documentation for best practices/testing is lacking
MOAR TOOLING
If you have something that works/you’ve created, share it with the community!
Lots of dependency on a few centralized packages - dangerous
Hardware in the Loop Testing
Need to look into this more.
Simulation is great, but some things are hardware-dependent.
Different types of tests to get different types of results
Log testing gives rare, real results that might never appear in simulation
“At the end of the day, you need a reliable system, and a reliable system is well tested.”
Even if simulation can’t catch everything, it’s better than nothing.
Code maintainers and reviewers could be requiring documentation with new pull requests.
Make documentation/testing a part of community standards.
No set of well-defined best practices for software quality. How do we fix that?
Community standards, again.
People look to OSRF for standards, so maybe starting there.
Also maintainers of large packages.
⚡ Lightning Talks 1¶
Cool vis of ROS contributions over time.
Needs a legend for the colors.
Should’ve grabbed the link
For some reason this conference platform keeps tripping the Firefox VR permissions. Do they have a WebXR viewer? Not willing to risk losing the stream again to figure out.
Ad for EProsima “The Middleware Experts”
Discovery server for ROS
Shared Memory
Sidenote: videos are hosted on Vimeo. Good choice, I guess, given the youtube outage 🤷♂️
Robot Dogs!
Aibo
Had one as a kid, back when they were...not good. Wonder if they’ve gotten better? Hard to tell from ad.
Ubuntu advertisement for snap
So fast, much snappy.
Look at that apt install, sped up to 4x and still trailing. What a scrub.
Ooh, flashy “ROS Underground” ad
DARPA Subterranean Challenge.
Interesting, tools provided competition.
11/17/2020
Daniel Grieneisen, Six River Systems
Shipping and warehousing robots
Flash backs to working back-end at Walmart shudders
Open source Data-processing pipeline, neat
They weren’t kidding about lightning, geez
These are some high-budget videos, wow.
Rocos
Some sort of ROS robot operations management tool
Widgets! Dashboards! Digital Twins! Autonomous missions! Visualizations! Fleets! Complexity! Security!
ARM ad
“5th wave of computing”
Buzzwordy buzzwords are buzzwording.
🏫 Time for Class¶
If anyone wants my notes on Bezier Curves, let me know 😉
Missed: networking break (meh), “MSeg: Achieving Generality and Robustness in Semantic Segmentation”.
🌱 Panel: ROS Agriculture¶
Stream wasn’t loading, so whatever occurred at the beginning is a mystery to me 😒
Got in, 20 minutes late
Sarah Osentoski (Moderator), SVP Iron OX; Michele Pratusevich, Direcotr of Software Development, Root AI; Lee Redden, Chief Scientist, Blue River Technology; Eitan Babcock, Chief Roboticist/Cofounder, American Robotics
...some stuff that I missed...
Need to couple engineering w/ extant agricultural knowledge from agronomists to achieve superior results
Robots can replicate grueling PhD research formerly done by hand, but much faster
Big push in CV using expert annotators - Ag is a good use case
Part of the job is to leverage the myopic knowledge of Ag researchers
Needs more love for 3D data - LIDAR, point clouds, etc.
Also change detection, time
Is Ag easy, due to minimal human interaction?
“Don’t know about easy, but different problem set”.
Advantages: everything’s on a grid, more control of certain variables and structure
No FDA testing like in medical
Fewer size and power, movement constraints
Limited ethical constraints (don’t know about this one)
Hard: no red tape, so stuff needs to work. Farmers have “show me” culture, needs to withstand the elements, operate in variety of potentially adverse conditions.
How do you deal with FDA requirements for cleaning tools etc?
Michele - “Thankfully, haven’t had to deal with it yet”
As volume scales: might eventually have safety requirements, IP requirements, etc.
Learn as we go.
Sarah - difference between agriculture (in the field) and manufacturing (on the conveyor)
Ever had to pivot areas in Ag?
Michele - not yet
Eitan - small shift from bulk to high-value crops.
Lee - pivoted form lawn mowers to tractors to implements; now some phenotyping.
Pivot from lettuce to row crops due to market size.
So many small subsegments in Ag, value-based priority shift/addition
Enabled by technology leap.
Connectivity issues?
Issues in greenhouse due to water content in air
Eitan - rely on LTE, problems if not near highway (most farms). Satellite also an option
Range on base station: point to point radio, multiple miles
Michele - “Once we send robot out into the row, we assume we can’t talk to it”
Also in greenhouse
Get data off robot at some point
Costs money and time to move data offsite
How do you prioritize data retention?
Lee
Embed intelligence on the robot
If we have connectivity, that’s a nice plus
How do you get buy-in from Farmers
Lee - farmers have been quite open and willing, straightforward with what’s valuable and what isn’t, allow demos and whatnot, constantly trying things and improving. Calculated risks
Michele - “part of it is relationship building”, building trust slowly over time, can’t destroy somebody’s crop, demo what’s possible. Onsite facility mocked up to demo stuff/use for marketing
Eitan - small pilot programs, work up to 6-month growing season.
Advice for roboticists interested in Ag?
Michele - find your niche. Pick a pain point and solve that, not generalized problems
Eitan - agreeing noises to michele, communication is important and talk to farmers when they’re not in the middle of growing season.
Lee - general roboticist? Apply to one of our companies!!
🥪 Lunch Break (Technically a Networking Break, but dammit I need to eat).¶
⚡ Lightning Talks 2¶
Spinning circle of doom. At least it’s better than the black screen from earlier, I guess.
Welp, someone posted the permalink, so here it is: https://
vimeo .com /478302472 Also, Vimeo needs to leave my VR headset alone for pity’s sake.
Apex.AI ad: self-driving stuff
Autonomous is hard, yo
ApexOS
ROS2 in RoboCup
Autonomous soccer bots!
Adorably janky
Lots of different components, really leveraging ROS for this
AWS Robotics Ad
I’m too poor for your product, Roger.
They do have a lot of integrated ROS extensions
Big emphasis on simulation and WorldForge stuff
Free Robotics Application Development Curriculum - Might be a good alternative to ROS Construct
8:02 going to other session, will come back to this later
...
And we’re back.
Fetch Robotics
History of ROS montage
Robots helping with COVID!
roscompile ad
Hate using CMake? roscompile makes all that nonsense less awful
Thankfully, much less of that in ROS2
ClearPath Robotics
Maker of nice rugged all terrain robots of various classifications
Love how industrial their mobile robots are
Rapyuta Robotics ad
More warehouse robots
🌍 MoveIt World¶
Lots of different technical sessions at 1:45pm, I chose this one because it’s relevant to stuff I want to do in the near future. Might go back and explore the other talks later.
For those who don’t know, MoveIt is a tool for motion planning with robotic arms.
9(!) presenters, including a number from PickNik (primary contributors to MoveIt).
World MoveIt day Hackathon
Closed many issues and pull requests
80 participants, 55 people signed up on discord
MoveIt on Discord and Discourse
MoveIt2 out of beta now
RoadMap Status Update
Already have straight port to ROS 2 94% complete
Currently refactoring for Realtime support
“Reactive, closed loop control”
“Separate global and local planner (hybrid planning)”
“Zero Memory Copy Integration”
Integrate pilz_industrial_motion
Cool motion planning demos
Lots of movement here: Google Summer of Code, Hackathons, research interns, and a well coordinator core contributors group. It’s an impressive open source org, to be sure.
Lots of features around pose-planning, moving the arm in intelligent ways to avoid collisions, stuff like that.
Hybrid planning - trying to solve for the different types of problems that an arm might need to solve (writing with chalk versus avoiding a collision with a surprise obstacle, for instance).
Definitely worth just digging through these slides/video in their/its entirety - no way I’m gonna be able to summarize this in text form (lot’s of good diagrams/visuals).
“Chicken egg” problem of hardware integration: need hardware support to drive ROS2 adoption, need ROS2 adoption to drive hardware support
micro-ROS - interesting project to work with microcontrollers on ROS, glad to see this getting attached to other projects like MoveIt
Next stage: fully leverage ROS 2
ROS 2 release every 6 weeks
Main branch switching to Rolling Ridley
Talk about calibrating a robot arm using a camera
2 forms: eye to hand, and eye in hand
Really more or less the same problem
Lots of transforms and math
I’mma need to brush up on my linear algebra
AX=XB solvers - there’s a bunch of solutions for this problem, including OpenCV
Live demo is a simulation, because the robot is broken - classic
I will note, RVIZ is a lot less ugly now.
Robot Assembly Presentation
Presenter from Omron
World Robot Summit Assembly Challenge
Challenge: build component with lots of small parts and fine motor control required
Traditional solution: lots of custom jigs and machining, separate everything into simple tasks
Very expensive!
Omron solution:
“Connecting a lot of things together -- ROS helps”
“Always strike a balance between prototyping speed and machine control”
“Sliding scale of complexity” to existing approaches
Really in-depth here, definitely good stuff if you’re interested in this kind of repeatable autonomous fine manipulation with end effectors
Pretty cool collaboration between two robot arms shown
Emphasis on robustness
Constraint-based Cartesian Planning
Task constraints: how tools and such are allowed to move
Generally expect cartesian planning to “just work”
Number of different options for planning cartesian movement, all with trade-offs
OMPL Constraint Planning - Summer of Code project
Used to plan NASA’s Robonaut 2
Need to replace existing “PoseModel” which has issues - joint space jumps and such
Lots of high quality gifs
Sampling-based motion planning - interesting approach to find valid and invalid poses
Robonaut 2 from NASA
Cool multi-armed robot that moves in zero-gravity on space station
Lots of path-planning, control challenges arise when trying to use arms to pull yourself around a tiny space capsule
TaskForce - tool to help task-based motion planning
Makes MoveIt control easier and more versatile
Currently open sourcing both tools
MoveIt Capabilities Overview
Good roll at the end showing all the different use-cases for MoveIt. Honestly, should’ve led with that.
⚡ Lightning Talks 3¶
Had to come back for this one.
PlotJuggler 3.0
+1 for most interesting man in the world meme.
Pretty good stuff from a data vis perspective, nice hooks into the ROS tooling
Window system reminds me of Visual Studio
Meme dunking on Matlab. Outstanding
GurumNetworks ad
High production quality, low calorie content
“Best DDS”
Intel OPENVINO Toolkit ad
Pictures = ton of data
Enables “Smart video and visualizations”
CV/Deep learning solution
Really throwing the kitchen sink of buzzwords
Microsoft Ad
ROS on windows - 100000+ downloads
Lots of integrations
Ooh, Mixed Reality Toolkit for ROS2 (mispelled in the slide, oops) - that’s pretty exciting
Zebracorns FRC Team 900
First Robotics Competition
Bringing ROS to FRC
Pretty wild output from Highschoolers. Good for them!
RobotIS
Turtlebot3!
Lots of fun consumer/industrial robotics showcasing happening here, very quickly.
Auterion
Autonomous Drone Flight Controller
Also includes other mobile robots?
Skynode
Sharp polos
Why doesn’t this guy have a polo?
SICK Sensor Intelligence
“Industry 4.0” ugh
Warehouse robotics solution
📕 Closing Remarks - Ryan Gariepy¶
Ryan Gariepy, CTO Clearpath/OTTO Motors
1.5 Megatons of CO2 saved by being online
More participants then ever before (maybe because it’s free?)
Lot of US attendees, but also from around the world
Many thanks to many sponsors
Roberta Friedman - Founder and CFO of Open Robotics, is retiring
Videos should be up by weekend
Survey coming soon
ROSCon 2021 October 19th-24th, in New Orleans
⚡ Lightning Talks 4¶
Webots Robot Simulator
Lots of premade robots to simulate
Graphical Editor
ROSin support
Weekly Robotics
Mat Sadowski does a great job with this weekly newsletter! Big fan of this guy’s work. Check it out here
Technaid S.L.
H3 Exoskeleton
A ROS compatible exoskeleton? Neat!
Definitely makes security seem really important
ROS Industrial
Ben Greenberg
ROS is intimidating for newbies - fair
Web-based tools for less technical users
3D viewer
WebVis interface and terminal emulator
Mobile Friendly
ROS for Robot Swarms
Phd Candidate(?) showing off swarm collaboration
Swarm Mapping
Swarm monitoring
Greenzie
Selfie cam, bold move
Lawn maintenance robots
Adapt electric lawn mowers to “Autostriping”
Lots of familiar tools and tech on here
ROS for Autonomous Maritime Systems
UL Lafayette Engineering
The C.R.A.W. Lab - Outstanding pun.
Look at that boat go.
RoboBoat! Big fan.
Even smaller RoboBoat!
MoveIt
Throwback to Omron’s presentation from the MoveIt talk.
Nobleo
Is that Sylvan Esso? No, just a similar bass line
Autonomous Pallet Jacks (Terrifying, to anyone who’s ever taken one to the ankle before).
More Digital Twins