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Silicon Valley Robotics - October 20, 2018
World MoveIt! Day is an international hackathon to improve the MoveIt! code base, documentation, and community. We hope to close as many pull requests and issues as possible and explore new areas of features and improvements for the now seven year old framework. Everyone is welcome to participate from their local workplace, simply by working on open issues. In addition, a number of companies and groups host meetings on their sites all over the world. A video feed will unite the various locations and enable more collaboration. Maintainers will take part in some of these locations.
Locations
- Note that the Tokyo and Singapore locations will have their events on Friday the 26th, not Thursday the 25th.
- Iron Ox, San Francisco, USA
- Organizer: Jon Binnery
- Event details
- PickNik Consulting, Boulder, USA
- Organizer: Dave Coleman
- Event details
- Fraunhofer IPA / RIC-EU, Stuttgart, Germany
- Organizer: Michael ‘v4hn’ Görner
- Event details
- ROS-Industrial Asian Pacific Consortium, Singapore
- October 26
- Organizer: Nicholas Yeo
- Event details
- Tokyo Opensource Robotics Kyokai Association (TORK) and OMRON SINIC X Corporation, Tokyo (Kashiwa), Japan
- October 26
- Organizer: Ryosuke Tajima
- Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, USA
- Organizer: Matt Robinson
- Cluster Innovation Centre, New Delhi, India
- Organizer: Ridhwan Luthra
- Event Details
- Shadow Robot Company, London, UK
- Organizer: Andriy Petlovanyy
- Event Details
General Information Contacts
- Dave Coleman, Nathan Brooks, Rob Coleman // PickNik Consulting
Signup
Please state your intent to join the event on this form. Note that specific locations will have their own signups in addition to this form.
If you aren’t near an organized event we encourage you to have your own event in your lab/organization/company and video conference in to all the other events. We would also like to mail your team or event some MoveIt! stickers to schwag out your robots!
Logistics
What version of MoveIt! should you use?
We recommend the Kinetic LTS branch/release. The Melodic release is also a good choice but is new and has been tested less. The Indigo branch is considered stable and frozen – and only critical bug fixes will be backported.
For your convenience, a VirtualBox image for ROS Kinetic on Ubuntu 16.04 is available here.
Finding Where You Can Help
Suggested areas for improvement are tracked on MoveIt’s GitHub repo via several labels:
- moveit day candidate labels issues as possible entry points for participants in the event. This list will grow longer before the event.
- simple improvements indicates the issue can probably be tackled in a few hours, depending on your background.
- documentation suggests new tutorials, changes to the website, etc.
- assigned aids developers to find issues that are not already being worked on.
- no label – of course issues that are not marked can still be worked on during World MoveIt! day, though they will likely take longer than one day to complete.
If you would like to help the MoveIt! project by tackling an issue, claim the issue by commenting “I’ll work on this” and a maintainer will add the label “assigned”. Feel free to ask further questions in each issue’s comments. The developers will aim to reply to WMD-related questions before the event begins.
If you have ideas and improvements for the project, please add your own issues to the tracker, using the appropriate labels where applicable. It’s fine if you want to then claim them for yourself.
Further needs for documentation and tutorials improvement can be found directly on the moveit_tutorials issue tracker.
Other larger code sprint ideas can be found on this page. While they will take longer than a day the ideas might provide a good reference for other things to contribute on WMD.
Documentation
Improving our documentation is at least as important as fixing bugs in the system. Please add to our Sphinx and Markdown-based documentation within our packages and on the MoveIt! website. If you have studied extensively an aspect of MoveIt! that is not currently documented well, please convert your notes into a pull request in the appropriate location. If you’ve started a conversation on the mailing list or other location where a more experienced developer explained a concept, consider converting that answer into a pull request to help others in the future with the same question.
For more details on modifying documentation, see Contributing.
Video Conference and IRC
Join the conversation on IRC with #moveit at irc.freenode.net. For those new to IRC try this web client.
Joint the video conference on Appear.In
Sponsorship
We’d like to thank the following sponsors:
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Robots in Depth - October 19, 2018
In this episode of Robots in Depth, Per Sjöborg speaks with Nicola Tomatis about his long road into robotics and how BlueBotics handles indoor navigation and integrates it in automated guided vehicles (AGV).
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Horizon Magazine - October 19, 2018
By Sandrine Ceurstemont
From about 245 to 66 million years ago, dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Although well-preserved skeletons give us a good idea of what they looked like, the way their limbs worked remains a bigger mystery. But computer simulations may soon provide a realistic glimpse into how some species moved and inform work in fields such as robotics, prosthetics and architecture.
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MIT News - October 18, 2018
MIT researchers have built a system that takes a step toward fully automated smart homes, by identifying occupants even when they’re not carrying mobile devices. Image: Chelsea Turner, MIT
By Rob Matheson
Developing automated systems that track occupants and self-adapt to their preferences is a major next step for the future of smart homes. When you walk into a room, for instance, a system could set to your preferred temperature. Or when you sit on the couch, a system could instantly flick the television to your favorite channel.
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Ilian Bonev - October 18, 2018
With the recent demise of Rethink Robotics, there were dozens of testimonials that the company revolutionized industrial robotics and kickstarted the collaborative robotics trend. There is no doubt that Baxter and Sawyer were truly innovative and more sophisticated than the average industrial robot. They were also safer than most other cobots, though at the expense of precision. So was Rethink Robotics the pioneer of collaborative robots?
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BAIR Blog - October 18, 2018
By Xue Bin (Jason) Peng and Angjoo Kanazawa
Whether it’s everyday tasks like washing our hands or stunning feats of acrobatic prowess, humans are able to learn an incredible array of skills by watching other humans. With the proliferation of publicly available video data from sources like YouTube, it is now easier than ever to find video clips of whatever skills we are interested in.
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Brad Templeton, Robocars.com - October 18, 2018
I love to talk about the coming robocar world. Over the next few decades, more and more trips will be made in robocars, and more and more people will reduce or give up car ownership to live the robotaxi life. This won’t be instantaneous, and it will happen in some places decades before it happens in others, but I think it’s coming.
interview by
Audrow Nash
- October 16, 2018
In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Patrick Tresset, a London based artist, on robots that draw people using a pen and paper in a way that is similar to the drawing process for humans. Tresset discusses his background in painting and programming, how his robot artists work, how he creates an experience for the person being drawn by the robots, about art history with robots, and about his future direction with robot artists.
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Oliver Mitchell - October 6, 2018
As Hurricane Florence raged across the coastline of Northern Carolina, 600 miles north the 174th Attack Wing Nation Guard base in Syracuse, New York was on full alert. Governor Cuomo just hung up with Defence Secretary Mattis to ready the airbase’s MQ-9’s drone force to “provide post-storm situational awareness for the on-scene commanders and emergency personnel on the ground.” Suddenly, the entire country turned to the Empire State as the epicenter for unmanned search & rescue operations.
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Sabine Hauert - October 6, 2018
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MIT News - October 5, 2018
By Rob Matheson
When moving through a crowd to reach some end goal, humans can usually navigate the space safely without thinking too much. They can learn from the behavior of others and note any obstacles to avoid. Robots, on the other hand, struggle with such navigational concepts.
interview by
Audrow Nash
- October 1, 2018
In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Robert Williamson, a Professor at the Australian National University, who speaks about a mathematical approach to ethics. This approach can get us started implementing robots that behave ethically. Williamson goes through his logical derivation of a mathematical formulation of ethics and then talks about the cost of fairness. In making his derivation, he relates bureaucracy to an algorithm. He wraps up by talking about how to work ethically.
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Sabine Hauert - October 1, 2018
The 2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (#IROS2018) will be held for the first time in Spain in the lively capital city of Madrid from 1 to 5 October. This year’s motto is “Towards a Robotic Society”.
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The Royal Society - October 1, 2018
By Jessica Montgomery, Senior Policy Adviser
Advances in AI technologies are contributing to new products and services across industries – from robotic surgery to debt collection – and offer many potential benefits for economies, societies, and individuals.
With this potential, come questions about the impact of AI technologies on work and working life, and renewed public and policy debates about automation and the future of work.
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Ricardo Téllez - October 1, 2018
I read an article entitled Games Hold the Key to Teaching Artificial Intelligent Systems, by Danny Vena, in which the author states that computer games like Minecraft, Civilization, and Grand Theft Auto have been used to train intelligent systems to perform better in visual learning, understand language, and collaborate with humans. The author concludes that games are going to be a key element in the field of artificial intelligence in the near future. And he is almost right.
In my opinion, the article only touches the surface of artificial intelligence by talking about games. Games have been a good starting point for the generation of intelligent systems that outperform humans, but going deeper into the realm of robots that are useful in human environments will require something more complex than games. And I’m talking about simulations.
