Canonical at ROSCon Macau 2019

Hey everyone, listen up, ROSCon 2019 is days away, and the Ubuntu team is going to be there. If you’re coming to Macau be sure to come and say hi at booth 22. Mention reading this blog and get a free high five? It’s going to be an event to remember. If you were at ROSCon JP, you’d know how the community is continuously growing and producing the very best in robotic development. With a vast list of companies and individuals attending this year, the conference floor is going to be buzzing with innovation.

We, Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, will be there demoing several robotic arms to a less than apparent end. We’ll be demonstrating some of the benefits of running snaps on devices and on any ROS projects. We will be equipped with Qualcomm hardware to exhibit how Ubuntu can be used embedded on development boards, and we’ll be there to talk. More than anything, we’ll be there to talk. Like everyone else in attendance we really just want to talk about ROS and see what other kind or Robotics people are working on. If you find some time, enlighten us on your work.

The Agenda

For more information head over to the official ROSCon 2019 website, or for live updates head over to Twitter during the event. This blog is simply a summary of what’s going on for people who are interested or folks less tuned into the ROSCon scene.

Day 0 – October 30th

The proceedings start on Day 0 with pre-registered workshops. The Ubuntu team will be at an undisclosed few, but they all sound like they will be pretty great. There are four tracks to choose from. The first has folks from Amazon and Alias robotics. The second has Ricardo Tellez from The Construct. The third will have Bosch, Ubiquity Robotics, Tier IV, Alias and Apex.AI speaking. And Bill Smart from Oregon State University will be taking the fourth track. Instead of listing every attendee giving a talk, a full list is given at the end of this blog. Scroll down and take a look at.

Day 1 – October 31st

Halloween day promises to be just as exciting and packed with activity. Brain Gerkey will be kicking things off with some opening remarks before the first two keynote speakers take the stage. Selina Seah of Changi general hospital and Morgan Quigley from Open Robotics. If robots in healthcare are at all interesting to you, it won’t be one to miss, the whole Ubuntu team will undoubtedly be there.

From then until lunch, attendees will be treated to talks and discussions concerning ROS in race car simulations, migrating code bases to ROS2, ROS visualisation in the browser and gazebo, and a panel on ROS at scale. There will be lots of big names in all of these topics with what I’m sure will be very insightful information into the types of projects they’re working on.

Then from lunch through to an end of the day group photo, there will be two tracks at a time. Folks can choose from talks about applications or simulations, until coffee, and then its between deployments and navigation until the end of the day. Each track will bring in different speakers from the industry to talk about their specific topic and what they’re doing in that field. With SLAM and swarm discussions, embedded Linux and rapid prototyping gazebo to hear about, it’s going to be tough to choose.

Day 2 – November 1st

Saving the best until last does not apply here, but only because days 0 and 1 look like they will be just as great. Day 1 begins with the final keynote speech from Ian Sherman, of Formant. He will discuss ROS in solution architecture and where ROS is an increasingly powerful business tool for addressing scaling challenges. When Ian finishes, the discussion will go deeper again. Starting with analysis from IRobot about using ROS2 for consumer robotics. Followed by a proactive discussion about bugs in ROS, a talk about composable nodes (or components) in ROS2, lightning talks and then lunch. I’m assuming the intrigue from the talks will boil over into lunch and “ROS in a sandwich” will be a workshop next year.

Then, again after lunch, the talks split into two tracks. This time manipulation or quality/performance until a coffee break. From lunch to coffee will be packed with so much information, on such a list of topics that it would only clutter this post. For specifics, as ever, head to the site. After coffee, the tracks change to a multidisciplinary track or a development track. The former takes on black box logging, AI planning, Language task engines, and collaboration in ROS. While the latter will deal with colcon as a universal build tool, reactive programming with [rx]ROS, developing apps with visual studio and azure, and markup extensions for the launch of ROS2.

Finally, the conference will fade out with another panel and some closing remarks. This last panel will cover ROS in research from several interesting perspectives.

Find Us

Clearly, the whole event is going to be packed with projects and discussions to carry back to the hotel. If anyone reading this who is attending the event finds that they can’t wait to talk about it, or they have a burning need to discuss something, speak to us. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, will be at booth 22. As mentioned earlier we will be there demoing the benefits of snaps, going to workshops and talking all things ROS with all folks ROSCon. Find us.

The Big Names and Their Booth Numbers at ROSCon 2019

Booth 22 – Canonical (Ubuntu)

Booth 1 – Amazon
Booth 2 – ADLINK
Booth 3 – Microsoft
Booth 4 – iRobot
Booth 5 – Clearpath Robotics
Booth 6 – Neobotix
Booth 7 – MiR Robot
Booth 8 – Baidu (Apollo)
Booth 9 – MathWorks
Booth 10 – Ekumen
Booth 11- Farmwise
Booth 12 – Botnuvo
Booth 13 – Alias Robotics
Booth 14 – Gaitech
Booth 15 – ROS-Industrial
Booth 16 – Bosch
Booth 17 – Locus Robotics
Booth 18 – Rapyuta Robotics
Booth 19 – ROBOTIS
Booth 20 – Tier IV
Booth 21 – Apex.AI

Booth 22 – Canonical (Ubuntu)
Booth 23 – Silexica
Booth 24 – Eprosima
Booth 25 – TRI (Toyota Research Institute)
Booth 26 – Seqsense
Booth 27 – LG Electronics (LGE)
Booth 28 – Yujin
Booth 29 – mov.ai
Booth 30 – Formant
Booth 31 – GurumNetworks
Booth 32 – 6-robot
Booth 33 – The Construct
Booth 34 – RT Corporation
Booth 35 – Renesas
Booth 36 – Ouster.io
Booth 37 – Scale AI
Booth 38 – Picknik
Booth 39 – Intel
Booth 40 – Fetch