ROS Developers Day 2020

ROS and Developer

For the third year The Construct organized the ROS Developers Day 2020, which took place on the 27th of June. This virtual event is held for robot operating system developers with the aim to connect ROS developers around the world without geographical restrictions to share and learn the latest ROS applications through real-time practice. PAL Robotics had the opportunity to participate in this year’s ROS Developers Day and our Software Engineer, Victor Lopez Boya, gave a presentation. We had interviewed Victor to find out his role and impression of the event.

What was your presentation, at the ROS Developers Day 2020, about?

I had the opportunity to give a presentation on “Creating Robot Statistics Easily”. During the presentation we introduced other ROS developers to our framework developed as a part of a ROSIN project called pal_statistics. The PAL Statistics Framework provides a way of gathering, aggregating, storing and visualizing statistics from arbitrary sources in a flexible and real-time safe way in ROS. From internal variables values to high level statistics about, but not limited to, robot performance, algorithm behaviour and robot state.

Which PAL Robotics’ robots did you use as an example?

During our presentation on “Creating Robot Statistics Easily” we used our research robot TIAGo.  We used TIAGo’s PCL (Point Cloud) Tutorial which shows how to achieve plane segmentation applied to the detection of a table and the objects on top of it. You can check for yourself the TIAGo robots simulation tutorial on Table segmentation (C++) in wiki ros website. 

By the way, you can also learn how to use TIAGo in The Construct learning platform following this link.

How do you think robotics enthusiasts benefit from your presentation?

I believe that pal_statistics is a very powerful tool that will allow ROS developers to learn a lot of new tricks for inspecting and visualizing their code, as well as better monitoring how their hardware or software behaves in the long run. You can learn more about our tool by visiting pal_statistics at GitHub.

How was the audience at the ROS Developers Day 2020, did you receive many questions?

Yes, the audience was great. I received over a dozen questions, but we had enough time to answer only a few of them during the presentation. But of course, I took my time and answered the remaining questions on chat. If you participated in our presentation and missed your chance to ask questions, you can still do it by contacting us here.

Would you recommend joining next year’s ROS Developers Day?

Absolutely, it is a great way for all ROS Developers to get together and share our knowledge and passion towards Robot Operating System developing. I had the chance to listen to many great speeches by well-known people in the ROS community.

Make sure to visit TIAGo’s website to know more about one of the most popular platforms for research with ROS and get started with ROS with our tutorials that will guide you from beginner to expert.

Check what other events we are going to take a part in by visiting our website. Do you have any questions? Then do not hesitate to and get in touch with us.

If you found this article informative, take a look at our blog about robotics and don’t hesitate to contact us!