ICRA 2009 Workshop on Open Source Software in Robotics

 

1. Organizers

1.          Dr. Hirohisa Hirukawa, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology,  Japan.

2.          Prof. Dr. Alois Knoll, Technische Universität München,  Germany.

 

2. Abstract – Open source software in robotics is an important platform on which future complex robotic systems, e.g., humanoid robots with many degrees of freedom or mobile manipulators, can be built with less effort than previously possible. This workshop will (i) present a synopsis of the open source software in robotics that has been distributed in the robotics community in recent years and (ii) will explore potential ways to build a common/standard software platform. The scope of this open source software may range from middleware to applications, including programming environments, dynamics simulators, navigation modules, and motion planners. The workshop will start with an overview of the actual state of affairs in open software for robots, including the statistics of the distributions, will continue to discuss individual new approaches and will conclude by discussing the (potential) interoperability between them.

 

3. Motivation and objectives – Open source software has played a major role in computer science, but its role has been much less significant in robotics.  As a result, robotic scientists have had to build software from scratch when they developed robotic systems, which is extremely inefficient and wasted developers’ time and effort. With hindsight, it has slowed down the  development in the field considerably. The reason for this is that researchers need to change not only parameters, but the whole behaviour and structure of robot control programs frequently during the development – which is only possible if they have open access to virtually all layers of the software they are using. Fortunately for roboticists, several new kinds of open source software have been distributed recently, albeit with limited resonance in the community up to now. The objective of the workshop is ,hence, to make these developments known to a broader public, show the power of available open source software including middleware and programming environments, and to discuss the possibilities of unifying what is already available – to eventually create a common software platform for robotics.

 

4. Program

Session I        Software Platform I

9:00- 9:25        Robotics Technology Framework, Alois Knoll (TU Münichen)

9:25- 9:50        ROS: an open-source robot operating system, Morgan Quigley (Stanford Univ) ,[Software]

9:50-10:15   OpenRT Platform: An Open software Platform  for Robotics Technology, Isao Hara & Fumio Kanehiro (AIST) [Software(OpenRTM-aist)][Software(OpenHRP3)]

 

<Coffee Break>

Session II       Software Platform II

10:45-11:10   Open Source Hardware and Software for Robotics, Giorgio Metta(IIT, Italy) [Software(YARP)][Software(RobotCub)]

11:10-11:25   Development of an Open Software Platform for Robotics Service in Korea, Hong Seong Park (Kangwon National Univ.)

11:35-12:00    Can open source ever make an impact in robotics? , Herman Bruyninchx (Univ. of Leuven, Belgium)

 

<Lunch Time>

Session III       Applications

13:20-13:45    Use of OpenCV in robotics, Gary Bradski (Willow Garage)

13:45-14:10    The Open Source Controller in COMAU Robotics, Gian Paolo Gerio(Comau) & Stefano Chiaverini(Univ. of Casino)

14:10-14:35    An Object-Oriented Programming System for Motion Planning, Lydia Kavraki (Rice Univ.)

14:35-15:00    Building Software for Consumer Robotics – One Component at a Time, Mario Munich (Evolution Robotics)

 

<Coffee Break>

Session IV        Future Perspective

15:30-17:00    Panel Discussion