Open Source Robotics Foundation

The IEEE Vision, Innovation, and Challenges Summit features 15 world-class speakers who will deep dive into the most crucial areas of technology today, including robotics, genome therapy, mixed r...

http://offlinezip.wpshojoin-open-robotics-at-the-ieee-vision-innovation-and-challenge-summit-on-may-11/

In a major milestone for the open source robotics community, we’re proud to announce that we’re opening our first overseas office in Singapore. More details will be available soon, but... 

http://offlinezip.wpshonew-office-singapore/

Fast Company just announced its annual ranking of the world’s Most Innovative Companies for 2018, honoring leading enterprises and rising newcomers that exemplify the best in business and innov...

http://offlinezip.wpshowere-1-in-robotics-according-to-fast-company/

Last week we all went to see the San Jose Sharks play the Las Vegas Golden Knights in the Shark Tank (officially known as the SAP Center): Despite the fact... 

http://offlinezip.wpshoopen-robotics-goes-to-the-shark-tank/

We’re honored and excited to share the news of renewed support for our work from Toyota Research Institute (TRI): Toyota Research Institute (TRI) continues its commitment to open source robotic...

http://offlinezip.wpshorenewed-support-from-toyota-research-institute/

This week we were happy to receive a visit from team Fireworks of Lynbrook High School in nearby San Jose. These young women compete in the FIRST Tech Challenge, in... 

http://offlinezip.wpsholynbrook-ftc-robotics-team-visit/

Happy Halloween, everyone! We all celebrate Halloween at Open Robotics, no matter where we’re working from!

http://offlinezip.wpshohappy-halloween-4/

ROSCon 2017 marked the second year of the conference’s diversity program, which is designed to enable participation in ROSCon by those typically underrepresented in the tech community. Thanks t...

http://offlinezip.wpshoroscon2017-diversity-review/

After a gorgeous and enlightening couple of days in Vancouver, we bid farewell to ROSCon 2017. We sold out ROSCon for the third year in a row, with over 475... 

http://offlinezip.wpshogoodbye-roscon-2017/

During his internship with Open Robotics, Adam Allevato ported a 3D object detector into ROS 2 and made it run on live depth camera data. The detector leverages ROS 2... 

http://offlinezip.wpshoros2-object-detection-demo/

We’re pleased to welcome Michael Grey! Grey looks forward to developing open source software tools that enable highly dynamic robots to reach their full potential. He believes robotics will ush...

http://offlinezip.wpshowelcome-to-michael-grey/

The ROSCon registration rates increase next Tuesday, August 1st! Register now at: https://roscon2017.eventbrite.com/ to get the early registration discount. We’re anticipating another record ye...

http://offlinezip.wpshoroscon-2017-early-registration-deadline-august-1st/

The results are in, and the ROSCon 2017 program has been posted! This year saw a record response from the community, with 107 proposals submitted. Following discussion and tough decision-making.....

http://offlinezip.wpshoroscon-2017-program-posted/

We are happy to announce the final results of the Agile Robotics for Industrial Automation Competition (ARIAC). ARIAC is a simulation-based competition designed to promote agility in industrial r...

http://offlinezip.wpshoariac-finals-results-announced/

We are excited to show off a simulation of a Prius in Mcity using ROS Kinetic and Gazebo 8. ROS enabled the simulation to be developed faster by using existing... 

http://offlinezip.wpshosimulated-car-demo/

Most of the interns and mentors spent a sunny day in San Francisco together. Our first stop was at Golden Gate park, where we fired up the grill to cook... 

http://offlinezip.wpshosummer-intern-mentor-outing/

We’ve been working for the past several months with the NASA Ames Intelligent Robotics Group. We’re helping them to model and simulate their forthcoming Resource Prospector (RP) rover, which ...

http://offlinezip.wpshogazebo-renders-the-moon/

At our company fun day last month, we used our newly acquired glass mosaic and welding skills to collaboratively create a sign that shows off our new name and logo.... 

http://offlinezip.wpshoa-new-sign-to-go-with-the-new-name/

Our own Tully Foote and Morgan Quigley will be leading our contingent to ICRA 2017. The event runs May 29 to June 3 in Singapore. Prior to ICRA, Tully will... 

http://offlinezip.wpsholook-for-open-robotics-at-icra/

As we announced back in September, we have created the Open Source Robotics Corporation (OSRC), a subsidiary of the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF). OSRC is a taxable subsidiary that... 

http://offlinezip.wpshowelcome-to-open-robotics/

We’re excited to announce that registration for ROSCon 2017 is now open: Register now! Note that the early registration deadline is August 1, 2017.

http://offlinezip.wpshoroscon-2017-registration-is-open/

It’s been a while since we took a break to just have some fun together, so we took the whole company out Wednesday to spend the day together. We started... 

http://offlinezip.wpshoosrf-fun-day-may-2017/

We’re excited to announce that we are now accepting presentation proposals for ROSCon 2017! Please see the call for proposals for more information and then submit your proposal. The deadline......

http://offlinezip.wpshoroscon-2017-call-for-proposals/

We are happy to announce that Qualifier 3 is now open for the Agile Robotics for Industrial Automation Competition (ARIAC)! ARIAC is a simulation-based competition is designed to promote agility....

http://offlinezip.wpshoariac-qualifier-3-is-open/

We’re pleased to welcome Steven! Ragnarok! Steven! is excited to be contributing to the tools, documentation, and infrastructure that power ROS. In the best timeline he’ll be sipping cold bre...

http://offlinezip.wpshowelcome-to-steven-ragnarok/

We’re pleased to welcome Shane Loretz! Shane is excited to help create open source software that enables others to make the world a better place, or at least make better... 

http://offlinezip.wpshowelcome-to-shane-loretz/

Save the date: we’re happy to announce that ROSCon 2017 will be held September 21-22, 2017 at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver, Canada. IROS 2017 will be held at... 

http://offlinezip.wpshosave-the-date-roscon-2017-in-vancouver-sep-21-22/

We’re happy to welcome Chris Lalancette to the team! Prior to joining OSRF, Chris worked for on both Open Source software and robotics software. He’s excited to combine the spirit... 

http://offlinezip.wpshowelcome-to-chris-lalancette/

From ros.org This year marks the occasion of ROS turning 9 years old! Through these years ROS has grown into a strong world-wide community. It’s a community with a large... 

http://offlinezip.wpshocelebrating-9-years-of-ros/

Every year, we’re impressed and humbled by the enthusiastic support we get from the ROS community. This year was certainly no exception. After ROSCon 2015 sold out weeks in advance,... 

http://offlinezip.wpshoroscon-2016-the-state-of-ros-is-strong/

Another year, another collection of creative and sometimes topical costumes. Happy Halloween, everybody!

http://offlinezip.wpshohappy-halloween-3/

Following an exciting weekend, we bid farewell to ROSCon 2016 in Seoul. It was record-breaking in every way, with over 450 attendees and a 60% increase over last year in... 

http://offlinezip.wpshogoodbye-roscon-2016/

Bosch Underwrites Full-Time Developer for ROS 2 Research A full-time developer sponsored by Bosch’s Research and Technology Center in North America will begin working with Open Source Robotics...

http://offlinezip.wpshobosch-research-and-technology-center-joins-forces-with-open-source-robotics-foundation-to-advance-the-development-of-ros/

You can see more formal announcements from us here and from Toyota Research Institute here, but we are very pleased to announce our new relationship with TRI. TRI is the... 

http://offlinezip.wpshowere-collaborating-with-toyota-research-institute/

Fundamentally, robotics is about helping people. Robots help us manufacture things, help us build things, and help make our lives easier and more convenient. As robotic systems increase in sophis...

http://offlinezip.wpshohaptix-simulation-of-prosthetic-devices/

Next week is the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. If you know anything about ROS and robots, then by now you know about the integration between ROS and Intel’s... 

http://offlinezip.wpshoros-at-the-intel-developer-forum/

Michael Ferguson spent a year as a software engineer at Willow Garage, helping rewrite the ROS calibration system, among other projects. In 2013, he co-founded Unbounded Robotics, and is currentl...

http://offlinezip.wpshomichael-ferguson-fetch-robotics-accelerating-your-robotics-startup-with-ros/

With just over 3 months to go before ROSCon 2016, we have some important announcements: * The deadline for submitting presentation proposals is July 8, 2016. If you want to... 

http://offlinezip.wpshoroscon-2016-proposal-deadline-july-8th-and-venue-information/

It’s not sexy, but the next big thing for robots is starting to look like warehouse logistics. The potential market is huge, and a number of startups are developing mobile... 

http://offlinezip.wpshomoritz-tenorth-magazino-maru-and-toru-item-specific-logistics-solutions-based-on-ros/

Clearpath Robotics is best known for building yellow and black robots that are the research platforms you’d build for yourself; that is, if it wasn’t much easier to just get... 

http://offlinezip.wpshotom-moore-working-with-the-robot-localization-package/

Matt Vollrath and Wojciech Ziniew work at an ecommerce consultancy called End Point, where they provide support for Liquid Galaxy; a product that’s almost as cool as it sounds. Originally... 

http://offlinezip.wpshomatt-vollrath-and-wojciech-ziniew-end-point-ros-driven-user-applications-in-idempotent-environments/

ROS already comes with a fantastic built-in visualization tool called rviz, so why would you want to use anything else? At Southwest Research Institute, Jerry Towler explains how they’ve create...

http://offlinezip.wpshojerry-towler-swri-mapviz-an-extensible-2d-visualization-tool-for-automated-vehicles/

BMW has been working on automated driving for the last decade, steadily implementing more advanced features ranging from emergency stop assistance and autonomous highway driving to fully automate...

http://offlinezip.wpshomichael-aeberhard-bmw-automated-driving-with-ros-at-bmw/

While Intel is best known for making computer processors, the company is also interested in how people interact with all of the computing devices that have Intel inside. In other... 

http://offlinezip.wpshoamit-moran-intel-introducing-ros-realsense-3d-empowered-robotics-innovation-platform/

Descartes is a path planning library that’s designed to solve the problem of planning with semi-constrained trajectories. Semi-constrained means that the degrees of freedom of the path you need...

http://offlinezip.wpshoshaun-edwards-swri-the-descartes-planning-library-for-semi-constrained-cartesian-trajectories/

To model a robot in rviz, you first need to create what’s called a Unified Robot Description Format (URDF) file, which is an XML-formatted text file that represents the physical... 

http://offlinezip.wpshokai-von-szadkowski-university-of-bremen-phobos-robot-model-development-on-steroids/

The ROS Industrial Consortium was established four years ago as a partnership between Yaskawa Motoman Robotics, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Willow Garage, and Fraunhofer IPA. The idea wa...

http://offlinezip.wpshomirko-bordignon-fraunhofer-ipa-and-shaun-edwards-swri-bringing-ros-to-the-factory-floor/

Dave Coleman has worked in (almost) every robotics lab there is: Willow Garage, JSK Humanoids Lab in Tokyo, Google, UC Boulder, and (of course) OSRF. He’s also the owner of... 

http://offlinezip.wpshodave-coleman-university-of-colorado-boulder-moveit-strengths-weaknesses-and-developer-insight/

Jackie Kay was upgraded from OSRF intern to full-time software engineer in 2014. Her background includes robotics education and path planning for autonomous lunar rovers. More recently, she’s b...

http://offlinezip.wpshojackie-kay-osrf-real-time-performance-in-ros-2/

ROS has been an enormously important resource for the robotics community. It turned eight years old at the end of 2015, and is currently on its ninth official release. As... 

http://offlinezip.wpshodirk-thomas-esteve-fernandez-and-william-woodall-osrf-state-of-ros-2/

OSRF Software Engineer Louise Poubel was recently asked to write an article about her upcoming presentation at the IEEE Women in Engineering International Leadership Conference on open source rob...

http://offlinezip.wpshothe-robotics-revolution-is-open-source/

From ros.org: Today may be April 1st, but this is no April Fools’ Joke: ROSCon 2016 will take place in Seoul, South Korea between October 8th and 9th! We’re very... 

http://offlinezip.wpshoroscon-2016-location-announced/

The growing popularity of ROSCon means that it’s not always possible to schedule presentations for everyone that wants to give one. In addition, many people have projects that they’d like...�...

http://offlinezip.wpshoroscon-lightening-talk-highlights/

The first step in doing something new, useful, and exciting with ROS is — without exception — learning how to use ROS. Ralph Seulin is part of CNRS in France,... 

http://offlinezip.wpshoralph-seulin-cnrs-france-ros-for-education-and-applied-research-practical-experiences/

Daniel Di Marco is part of Deepfield Robotics, a 20 person agricultural robotics startup within Bosch. Deepfield makes robots that can, among other things, visually locate and then brutally destr...

http://offlinezip.wpshodaniel-di-marco-bosch-docker-based-buildfarm-for-ros/

During her Outreachy internship at Open Source Robotics Foundation, Nadya Ampilogova worked on a TurtleBot User Experience project. The goal was to extend learn.turtlebot.com with lessons taking ...

http://offlinezip.wpshoimproving-the-turtlebot-user-experience-using-simulation/

Do you want to spend the summer coding on Gazebo or ROS? OSRF has been accepted for GSoC and we are looking for talented students who want to participate as... 

http://offlinezip.wpshoosrf-accepted-for-google-summer-of-code-2016/

Every day, roboticists write code that helps their robots do amazing new things. And every day, this code remains virtually useless to anyone else, because outside distribution is such a... 

http://offlinezip.wpshoruffin-white-georgia-tech-ros-docker-enabling-repeatable-reproducible-and-deployable-robotic-software-via-linux-containers/

Morgan Quigley is first author of the authoritative 2009 workshop paper on the Robot Operating System. He’s been Chief Architect at OSRF since 2012, and in 2013, MIT Tech Review... 

http://offlinezip.wpshomorgan-quigley-osrf-ros-2-on-small-embedded-systems/

PX4 is a flight control software stack for autonomous aerial robots that describes itself as “rocket science straight from the best labs, powering anything from racing to cargo drones.” One.....

http://offlinezip.wpshoroman-bapst-eth-zurich-and-px4-ros-on-dronecode-systems/

What’s ROS android_ndk? Why should you care? How does it work? Gary Servín is with Ekumen, an engineering and software consulting company based in Buenos Aires, Argentina that specializes in.....

http://offlinezip.wpshogary-servin-ekumen-ros-android_ndk-what-why-how/

Stefan’s early research using tiny soccer-playing humanoid robots at Technische Universität Darmstadt in Germany prepared him well for software development on much larger humanoid robots that ...

http://offlinezip.wpshostefan-kohlbrecher-technische-universitaet-darmstadt-an-introduction-to-team-vigirs-open-source-software-and-drc-post-mortem/

In 2004, Canonical released the first version of Ubuntu, a Debian-based open source Linux OS that provides one of the main operational foundations of ROS. Canonical’s founder, Mark Shuttleworth...

http://offlinezip.wpshomark-shuttleworth-canonical-commercial-models-for-the-robot-generation/

A few noteworthy events related to Gazebo have occurred over the previous couple months. A new version of Gazebo has been released, simulation tutorials have received an overhaul, and a... 

http://offlinezip.wpshogazebo-updates/

ROSCon is an annual conference focused on ROS, the Robot Operating System. Every year, hundreds of ROS developers of all skill levels and backgrounds, from industry to academia, come together...�...

http://offlinezip.wpshoroscon-program-video-brian-gerkey/

Eight years ago, Morgan Quigley, Eric Berger and Andrew Ng published a paper that was not about ROS. It was about STAIR, the STanford Artificial... 

http://offlinezip.wpshoros-turns-8/

OSRF CEO, Brian Gerkey, was recently asked to contribute his thoughts as part of O’Reilly Media’s recent Next: Economy Summit. Called “WTF”, the event tackled the issues of how work,... ...

http://offlinezip.wpsholooking-forward-to-the-robot-economy/

Open Source Robotics Foundation is joining DARPA and Tandem National Security Innovations on the road to spread the word about DARPA’s Robotics Fast Track Program. We’re proud to support the....

http://offlinezip.wpshojoin-us-for-darpas-robotics-fast-track-west-coast-tour-nov-17-19/

Happy Halloween from OSRF! Our commitment to wearing costumes at work is as strong as our commitment to open source software!

http://offlinezip.wpshohappy-halloween-2/

This year’s ROSCon is nearly upon us. If you haven’t yet made plans to get yourself to Hamburg, then you are out of luck as this year’s ROSCon has sold... 

http://offlinezip.wpshotune-in-to-roscon-2015-oct-3-4/

During his internship with OSRF, Mike Kasper developed a new ignition-robotics rendering library. The key feature of this library is that it provides an abstract render-engine interface for buil...

http://offlinezip.wpshogazebo-rendering-abstraction/

The Advanced Robotic Systems Engineering Lab at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA recently flew fifty small autonomous planes together using ROS. Each plane – a styrofoam wing with...

http://offlinezip.wpshofifty-planes-in-the-air-running-ros-gazebo/

As another result of the exciting DARPA Robotics Challenge, Gazebo has improved its capabilities in the aeronautics and hydrodynamics fields. We expect these changes to benefit the way UAVs and.....

http://offlinezip.wpshogazebo-gets-better-at-flying-and-diving/

OSRF has been intimately involved in the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) from the beginning in June 2012, when we started getting Gazebo into shape to meet the simulation needs of... 

http://offlinezip.wpshoros-gazebo-at-the-drc-finals/

OSRF is pleased to welcome Frantisek Durovsky, Konstantinos Chatzilygeroudis, Mykola Dolhyi, Nima Shafii, Ratnesh Madaan and Steve Ataucuri, our 2015 students for the Google Summer of Code! Frant...

http://offlinezip.wpshoosrf-welcomes-our-2015-gsoc-students/

Join OSRF at the biggest robotics event of the year, the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Finals! If you’re looking for some excitement on June 5 and 6, head on over... 

http://offlinezip.wpshostop-by-the-osrf-booth-at-the-drc-finals/

We’re excited to announce that OSRF and BIT Systems are seeking innovative and revolutionary robotics projects for the Robotics Fast Track (RFT) effort, sponsored by the Defense Advanced Resear...

http://offlinezip.wpshorobotics-fast-track-now-accepting-applications/

A workshop on Realistic, Rapid, and Repeatable Robot Simulation (R4SIM) will be held at the Robotics Science and Systems conference  in Rome, Italy. The R4SIM workshop is motivated by the need...

http://offlinezip.wpshorss-2015-workshop-on-robot-simulation/

This piece was written as a precursor to the Silicon Valley Robotics panel titled “Women in Robotics: Challenge or Opportunity?” Join us at IDEO’s San Francisco office on Wednesday, April.....

http://offlinezip.wpshorobots-women-design-opportunities-abound/

Our friends at Clearpath Robotics announced today that they’re offering ROS consulting services for enterprise R&D projects. And they’ve committed to giving part of the proceeds to OSRF, to s...

http://offlinezip.wpshoclearpath-offers-ros-consulting-service/

As part of the run-up to the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals in June, check out this piece on the role of tools like Gazebo: “The Value of Open Source Simulation... 

http://offlinezip.wpshothe-value-of-open-source-simulation/

We reported last year that our friends at MathWorks had released ROS support for MATLAB. They presented that work in a talk at ROSCon 2014. That ROS support has now... 

http://offlinezip.wpshomathworks-announces-robotics-system-toolbox/

Accepted students will participate in real-world software development, contributing to robotics projects like Gazebo, ROS, and Ignition Transport, and engaging with the global robotics community,...

http://offlinezip.wpshoosrf-is-in-google-summer-of-code-version-2015/

We’re pleased to announce that OSRF has joined the Dronecode Project, which promotes open source platforms for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). That mission, plus the burgeoning use of ROS and....

http://offlinezip.wpshoosrf-joins-dronecode/

At the end of January, Baxter left OSRF for a stint in Corvallis, Oregon where he will be used in a project that is investigating the use of teleoperated robots... 

http://offlinezip.wpshodr-baxter-goes-to-oregon/

The Gazebo team has been hard at work setting up a simulation environment for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s Hand Proprioception and Touch Interfaces (HAPTIX) program. ...

http://offlinezip.wpshogazebo-released-for-darpa-haptix-project/

OSRF is pleased to welcome Ying Lu! Ying is currently a Ph.D. student at the Robotics Lab of the Department of Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, under the direction... 

http://offlinezip.wpshoosrf-welcomes-ying-lu/

OSRF is pleased to welcome Louise Poubel! Louise grew up in Brazil and thought why not cross the world and go to college in Japan? As if two continents weren’t... 

http://offlinezip.wpshoosrf-welcomes-louise-poubel/

We are happy to introduce a prototype for ROS 2 in deeply-embedded systems, using the stm3240g-eval board, which contains an STM32F4 microcontroller, an Ethernet interface, and some extra SRAM. T...

http://offlinezip.wpshoros2-gets-embedded/

Toward the end of last year, we asked you for financial support. And you responded. We received donations ranging from $2 to $100, coming from individuals spanning 26 countries. It’s... 

http://offlinezip.wpshothank-you-to-osrf-supporters/

Ubuntu announced today that their new Snappy Core operating system, already being adopted for cloud computing, will be specifically supported on embedded, connected, mobile devices (aka Internet ...

http://offlinezip.wpshoubuntu-ros-apps-on-the-way/

We’re happy to announce that OSRF will be an advisor to the Eyes of Things (EoT) project, which was recently selected by the European Commission in one of the first... 

http://offlinezip.wpshonew-project-eyes-of-things/

OSRF is pleased to welcome Esteve Fernandez! After working for many years on distributed systems, Esteve switched gears and pursued a career in robotics. He also enjoys writing software and... 

http://offlinezip.wpshoosrf-welcomes-esteve-fernandez-2/

When we started the ROS project back in 2007, our goal was to build an open robotics software platform for students, engineers, entrepreneurs, and anyone else to freely use and... 

http://offlinezip.wpshosupport-osrf/

We’re pleased to announce the public release of information on a long-standing collaboration between OSRF and Sandia National Labs. The Intelligent Systems Control Department at Sandia is devel...

http://offlinezip.wpshohumanoid-robot-with-open-electronics/

OSRF is pleased to welcome Rachel Hwang, our intern for the Outreach Program for Women! Rachel got her B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Chicago. As an undergrad,... 

http://offlinezip.wpshoosrf-welcomes-rachel-hwang/

Look at all these enthusiastic robot nerds! Even Baxter got dressed up. Happy Halloween from everyone at the Open Source Robotics Foundation!

http://offlinezip.wpshohappy-halloween-from-osrf/

A couple of weeks ago, we said goodbye to our old office, the original home of OSRF. Now that we’re totally unpacked, we can say hello to our new office.... 

http://offlinezip.wpshosaying-hello-to-the-new-office/

Tashwin Khurana, M.S. student in Computer Science from Lehigh University, worked with OSRF during her internship as part of the Gnome Outreach Program for Women. Tashwin developed a tool for... ...

http://offlinezip.wpshoopen-street-maps-support-in-gazebo/

Since July 2012, OSRF has lived happily in Mountain View in our office on Shoreline Boulevard. In the intervening 2+ years, the team has expanded and now we’ve outgrown that... 

http://offlinezip.wpshosaying-goodbye-to-the-old-office/