Open Robotics and Google Summer of Code 2024
It’s time for another Google Summer of Code (GSoC)! We have five contributors this year, all working on improving aspects of Gazebo. Rakesh Vivekanandan, Helena Moyan and Gaurav Kumar will be working with Woensug Choi and Mabel Zhang on physics-based sonar simulation for underwater robots. Saurabh Kamat will be working with Jose Luis Rivero on improving how users install Gazebo. Yaswanth Gonna is going to help Steve Peters put together an improved set of worlds for benchmarking physics engines.
ROS 2 Jazzy Jalisco Released
The OSRF is are happy to announce the tenth release of ROS 2, Jazzy Jalisco, released on May the 23rd, 2024! Jazzy is a Long Term Support release that will be supported until the end of May, 2029.
Announcing the Open Source Robotics Alliance
Open Robotics (OSRF) is pleased to announce the creation of the Open Source Robotics Alliance (OSRA). The OSRA is a new initiative from the OSRF to ensure the long-term stability and health of our open-source robot software projects.
Audrow Nash to step down from hosting the Sense, Think, Act podcast
Audrow Nash is moving on to the next phase of his podcasting career and will be stepping down as the host of the OSRF’s Sense, Think, Act podcast. Under Audrow’s masterful leadership and hosting, Sense, Think, Act has become one of the premier places to hear interviews with leaders in the world of robotics.
ROSCon 2023 Recap
ROSCon 2023, our twelfth annual ROS developers' conference, was held in New Orleans, Louisiana on October 18-20, 2023. The conference was a success, bringing together over 700 ROS developers from 42 countries to learn from each other and share the latest advances in ROS and robotics technology. We were also thrilled to see the Dronecode Foundation’s flagship PX4 Developers’ Summit hosted immediately after ROSCon in the same venue, allowing a number of attendees to attend both events and learn from others in a closely-related field (not to mention see a fantastic drone show put on by the Dronecode Foundation and UVify!).
Gazebo Harmonic Released!
The Gazebo team is happy to announce the 8th release of Gazebo, “Gazebo Harmonic”. This new release represents a year of development by our Gazebo developer community, and it is one of our biggest Gazebo releases yet! The release is jam packed full of new features, and we believe that most Gazebo users will be excited to upgrade as soon as possible! A complete list of features can be found in the release notes, but we wanted to take a moment to point out some of the highlights.
Google Summer of Code & Virtual RobotX
Meet Tejal, one of our Google Summer of Code students for 2023.
Gazebo 2023 Google Summer of Code
We’re really excited to announce our Google Summer of Code (GSoC) students for 2023. This year we are mentoring two GSoC students who are helping us with the development of new features for Gazebo that will hopefully make it into the Gazebo Harmonic release later this year. We asked the students to share a little bit about themselves and what they plan to work on over the summer.
ROS 2 Humble Now Available on TurtleBot 4
We are excited to announce that Clearpath Robotics, our partners in developing the TurtleBot 4, have released Humble Hawksbill packages for the TurtleBot 4! Humble Hawksbill is currently the latest long term support (LTS) version of ROS 2, and our recommended ROS distribution for those who wish to learn about ROS.
ROS 2 Iron Irwini Released!
Crikey, it’s that time of year already! May 23rd, World Turtle Day and ROS release day. Today we are happy to announce the ninth release of ROS 2, Iron Irwini! Iron is a short term release that will be supported until the end of November 2024. In accordance with REP-2000, ROS Iron supports three Tier 1 operating systems: Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish (both arm64 and amd64 architectures) and Windows 10. If you want to try it out, our installation instructions and tutorials are now up and ready to go on docs.ros.org.
Congratulations to our colleagues at Intrinsic!
This morning our colleagues at Intrinsic had their first product Keynote, which you can watch here. We are thrilled to congratulate Intrinsic on the launch of the Intrinsic platform and their new product Flowstate! We are pleased to see that our former Open Robotics colleagues are helping Intrinsic democratize access to robotics and that they are making progress towards this mission with the help of both ROS and Gazebo.
OSRF Donates TurtleBots to Home Brew Robotics Club
We’re cleaning out our office and putting legacy TurtleBot’s to good use.
OSRF launches an official Discord server
To support those members of the community who prefer a real-time chat-based method of communication, OSRF has launched an official Discord server.
Announcing the OSRF Project Committee for Space ROS
Following the successful first two years of the collaboration between NASA, Blue Origin, and Open Robotics, the Open Source Robotics Foundation, as the steward of the project, is pleased to announce the launch of the Space ROS Project Committee.
Intrinsic Acquires OSRC and OSRC-SG
We have a big announcement about the future of ROS, Gazebo, and Open-RMF. The developer team at Open Robotics has joined Intrinsic. Under this new arrangement our core maintainers will be able to devote more of their time to building the open-source projects you love, and the OSRF will have significantly more time and resources to devote to project governance and community outreach. Rest assured that as part of this new arrangement the ROS, Gazebo, and Open-RMF intellectual property will remain in the hands of the Open Source Robotics Foundation, just like they always have.
Improving Simulation Interoperability and Domain Randomization with MuJoCo and DeepMind
Today we are happy to announce that we have released the sdformat-mjcf library that allows for seamless conversion between the two formats! The software is currently available on PyPI and allows users to convert models / worlds, joints (such as ball, continuous, fixed, prismatic, and revolute joints), sensors (such as altimeters, cameras, force torque sensors, and IMUs) and materials between the two formats. In practical terms this means that users of both MuJoCo and Gazebo are able to quickly and easily toggle between the two simulation environments. This new tooling opens up the entire universe of models available for Gazebo to the MuJoCo user community, and provides MuJoCo users with the capability to use their models in Gazebo.
Open-RMF Capabilities Extended in Collaboration with NCS
Open source works best when you have a strong community that embraces collaboration. We’re really excited to share that NCS (ncs.co) is one of those community members that saw the value of Open-RMF (open-rmf.org) and worked with us to extend and apply the open source platform in order to better support their specific needs in fleet management of security robots.
General Purpose Robots Should Not Be Weaponized: An Open Letter to the Robotics Industry and our Communities
Over the course of the past year Open Robotics has taken time from our day-to-day efforts to work with our colleagues in the field to consider how the technology we develop could negatively impact society as a whole. In particular we were concerned with the weaponization of mobile robots. After a lot of thoughtful discussion, deliberation, and debate with our colleagues at organizations like Boston Dynamics, Clearpath Robotics, and many others, we have co-authored and signed an open letter to the robotics community entitled, “General Purpose Robots Should Not Be Weaponized.” You can read the letter, in its entirety, here.
