Archive 31.03.2022

The online MEng in Robotics & Intelligent Autonomous Systems program from the University of Cincinnati provides specialized training in several disciplines, including computer science, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, systems engineering, and project management. This industry-focused degree combines technical mastery with professional skills. Students are exposed to a broad set of topics to innovate and envision new systems while developing skills needed to build the future's reliable, safe, secure, and trusted systems.

Imagine a pizza maker working with a ball of dough. She might use a spatula to lift the dough onto a cutting board then use a rolling pin to flatten it into a circle. Easy, right? Not if this pizza maker is a robot.

Over the past few decades, technological advances have opened new and exciting possibilities for both remote tourism and the teleoperation of robotic systems. This allowed computer scientists to develop increasingly sophisticated systems that allow humans to virtually visit remote locations in immersive ways.

In general, the more data an artificial intelligence device can capture, the better it will perform. This fact may influence some businesses to use specific robots and autonomous machines that are designed to be compatible with their existing technologies.

March 22nd, 2012 is the day it all began. That’s the day we officially incorporated the Open Source Robotics Foundation, the origin of what we now call Open Robotics. The prospect of starting a company is both scary and exciting; but starting an open-source company in a niche as specialized as robotics, now that is terrifying and exhilarating, if not a little unorthodox. All we had was a dream, some open-source code, and some very smart friends, a whole lot of them.

We also had the wind at our backs. Until March of 2012, Willow Garage had been the stewards of ROS and Gazebo and nurtured it from an idea to a growing community. Willow had always planned to have ROS and Gazebo ‘graduate’ to an entity outside of the Willow Garage; to make any real progress in robotics required a worldwide effort, not that of a single company. The catalyst was the DARPA Robotics Challenge. When OSRF was hired to create and manage the world’s first-ever robotics simulation event, the company was up and running.

Ten years later, here we are, an overnight success a decade in the making! And we couldn’t have done it without the help of the ROS and Gazebo community. On this important day, we wanted to look back on what we’ve accomplished for and with that community, the robotics industry, and the world in general.

First and foremost, we’ve made a lot of ROS and Gazebo releases! After ten years we’ve managed to release nine ROS 1 distros, eight ROS 2 distros (about to be nine), eleven Gazebo distros, and coming up on seven Ignition distros. The interest in ROS has grown to the point where we needed tooling to integrate multiple robotic systems together, so we’ve also created a fifth open-source project, Open-RMF.

However, distro releases are only part of the story. Along the way the community has kept pace and has continued to introduce an incredible number of ROS packages to augment the core capabilities of ROS. Looking at just public Github repositories, there are 5852 repositories tagged for ROS and 707 ROS 2 repositories. Not to be outdone, the academic community has cited the original ROS paper, “ROS: an open-source Robot Operating System,” 9451 times according to Google Scholar. Our annual developers meeting, ROSCon, is now entering its tenth year, and we’re happy to report that we’ve had over 8000 attendees, and generous sponsorship from over 150 different organizations.

Looking back over the years, one of the most common themes in our work is friendly competition. We’ve worked with clients all over the globe to create realistic simulations of almost every robotics domain; from factories in NIST ARIAC, to maritime environments in VRX, to disaster sites in the DARPA Robotics Challenge, we’ve seen it all! We recently concluded the DARPA SubT competition, which marks our ninth high-profile competition successfully executed, with two more in the works now. We believe that these friendly competitions between robot developers have been one of the driving forces behind our success.

As we’ve grown, we’ve also seen ROS and Gazebo communities grow along with us. Last year, the ROS Wiki had approximately 2.5 million visitors, and at least one visitor from every single country on the globe! In 2011, the first year of our record keeping, we only served 290,102 ROS binary packages, and in ten years that number has soared to 35,036,199 in 2021! Similarly, in 2011 we had only 4517 unique visitors downloading ROS packages, and today that number has grown to 789,956 unique visitors. That’s 175 times more users in just a decade! What was once just a handful of researchers and students is now a world-wide community of professionals, hobbyists, and academics.

In our ten years, Open Robotics itself has also grown and changed. When we started in 2012 we were just a handful of people working in a small office, today we’re a team of 50 people spread out across the globe, with staff in the US, Singapore, Spain, Germany, and Japan. We’ve mentored dozens of interns, both in-house and through the Google Summer of Code and Outreachy programs, who have gone on to have successful careers and some of whom have even founded their own companies.

It has been a wild ten years and truly humbling to see an untold number of developers and users support and build upon our work. We don’t know what the next ten years will look like; we may reach the moon, or the bottom of the ocean, but we won’t be able to get there without the support of our open-source community. We look forward to the next decade!.

Findings describe a novel way to reduce the energy people spend to walk, as much as by half, which could have applications for therapy received by patients with impaired walking abilities.

Learn how to implement the infamous contrastive self-supervised learning method called SimCLR. Step by step implementation in PyTorch and PyTorch-lightning

To transform human mobility, exoskeletons need to interact seamlessly with their user, providing the right level of assistance at the right time to cooperate with our muscles as we move.

Raspberries are the ultimate summer fruit. Famous for their eye-catching scarlet color and distinctive structure, they consist of dozens of fleshy drupelets with a sweet yet slightly acidic pulp. But this delicate structure is also their primary weakness, as it leaves them vulnerable to even the slightest scratch or bruise. Farmers know all too well that raspberries are a difficult fruit to harvest—and that's reflected in their price tag. But what if robots, equipped with advanced actuators and sensors, could lend a helping hand? Engineers at EPFL's Computational Robot Design & Fabrication (CREATE) lab have set out to tackle this very challenge.

UCLA environmental law professor Sean Hecht was walking across the campus one recent night when he photographed a uniquely modern urban transport scene: a snarl of food delivery robots that couldn't figure out a way around a pile of discarded electric scooters.

In a low-light Culver City, California control room, Lily Shaw is getting her pilot mood on.

Since the beginning of the coronavirus crisis at the latest, the pharmaceutical industry and laboratories have been under pressure to realize the highest possible levels of automation.

Over the last century, we have mined more and more raw materials, and manufactured products from those materials. Increased prices for mined raw materials and improved recycling technology have enabled some industries to rely more on recycled materials than ever before. A report by Bob Tita in the Wall Street Journal last week detailed this trend in the aluminum business. According to Tita:

Robotic wheelchairs may soon be able to move through crowds smoothly and safely. As part of CrowdBot, an EU-funded project, EPFL researchers are exploring the technical, ethical and safety issues related to this kind of technology. The aim of the project is to eventually help the disabled get around more easily.

Advances in semiconductors have led to dramatic developments in a wide range of sensor and camera technologies, including sensors/cameras for area scan and line scan, IP/network, 3D, and thermal imaging platforms.