ROSCon is a developers’ conference, in the model of PyCon and BoostCon. Following the success of the inaugural ROSCon in St. Paul, Minnesota this year’s ROSCon will be held in Stuttgart, Germany, immediately following the ICRA conference.

Sylvain Joyeux will give a talk about 'ROS and Rock: mixing Orocos components and ROS nodes into a model-driven toolchain' on the first day. Orocos users and developers visiting ICRA are invited to stay one or two days longer in order to attend this event and meet with each other.

The Orocos Toolchain developers are content[1] to announce the 2.6 release cycle of the Orocos Toolchain. As in the previous release cycle, the emphasis is on stability, incremental development and stable API's.

Dear orocos-user and orocos-developer,

With this email I want to announce the "geometric-relations-semantics"
software (http://www.orocos.org/wiki/geometric-relations-semantics-wiki).

The geometric relations semantics software (C++) implements the
geometric relation semantics theory, hereby offering support for
semantic checks for your rigid body relations calculations. This will
avoid commonly made errors, and hence reduce application and,
especially, system integration development time considerably.

The Robotics teams of the CEA LIST (France) are organizing some Tech days for our research partners. Since we are (heavily) using Orocos (mainly RTT, OCL) we thought that the Orocos community might be interested as well.

At the European Robotics Forum 2012 KU Leuven and Intermodalics are organizing a three-part seminar, appealing to both industry and research institutes, titled:

1. Introduction to state charts and reusable, modular task specification through the Orocos eco-system
2. Hands-on-1: getting started with rFSM state charts in the Orocos eco-system
3. Hands-on-2: getting started with instantaneous motion specification using constraints (iTaSC): reusable and modular task specification

For all information, you can consult the Workshop page

Bert Willaert, researcher at department of Mechanical Engineering at the KU Leuven, Belgium, has used OROCOS for a highly dynamic force-feedback application.


Click below to read more about this movie.

Taking advantage that quite a few Orocos users and developers were attending IROS 2011 in San Francisco, USA, an informal meeting was organized to get to know each other and exchange our experiences and use cases.

Among the attendants were people from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, that were showing live demos on robots like the PR2, the Kuka LWR, and the Kuka Youbot; NASA, that is currently using and evaluating Orocos in the context of the Robonaut 2 project; and PAL Robotics, that uses Orocos on their biped and wheeled robots REEM-B and REEM, respectively.

Meeting developers from the mailing list in person is always great as it attaches a face to the email. Moreover, getting the opportunity to learn about the other's challenges and success stories is great for identifying future collaborations and moving the Orocos community forward. We hope to repeat this experience soon, and with more of us!