WIN ‘Bridging the Gaps’ Lecture
Robotics Engineering Colloquium Series
Mabel Zhang and Chris Lalancette
All about ROS 2 and the new Gazebo
Wednesday, November 1st, 2023
11:30 PM - 1:00 PM
Unity Hall Rm 520 (Pizza will be served)
Abstract: While ROS 2 has seen wide adoption in industry, including mission-critical space applications (NASA VIPER) and autonomous vehicles (Apex.AI), academic users have been uncertain. In this tutorial, we hope to address the uncertainty by exposing attendees to new features in ROS 2 and the new Gazebo (formerly Ignition).
We will first present reasons one might choose ROS 2, feature comparisons between ROS 1 and ROS 2, whether ROS 2 is right for different applications, and our migration resources. Then, we will present similar topics on Gazebo-classic and new Gazebo. In addition to a general overview of the new Gazebo, we will highlight features (including support for Bullet Featherstone) useful for robotic manipulation, some of which are new in Gazebo Harmonic released in September 2023.
This is a mini version adapted from the "All about ROS 2 and the new Gazebo" full-day tutorial [1] we gave at ICRA 2023. While it is impossible to cover all of the software foundations underlying ROS 2 and new Gazebo even in a full-day tutorial, less a one-hour talk, we will highlight key points and provide links and resources, should attendees wish to look up further on any subject we cover.
Hands-on materials, should attendees wish to try out ROS 2 Humble and Gazebo Garden in their own time, are available on our ICRA 2023 GitHub repository [1], which provides Dockerfiles, presentation slides from ICRA, and a pre-built image on Docker Hub.
[1] Mabel Zhang and Chris Lalancette. "All about ROS 2 and the new Gazebo." Full-day tutorial, ICRA 2023. https://github.com/osrf/icra2023_ros2_gz_tutorial
Bios:
Mabel M. Zhang, Open Robotics team at Intrinsic
Mabel defended her Ph.D. on tactile and visuotactile perception for manipulation and exploration at the GRASP Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania, in December 2018. Since then, she has been working at Open Robotics (formerly part of Open Source Robotics Foundation or OSRF, now at Intrinsic).
For nearly 5 years, she has been on the Gazebo core development team, contributing source code, maintenance time, and advocating for documentation and community-facing tutorials. In addition, she has worked on application-level client projects including migrating from ROS to ROS 2, DARPA SubTerranean Challenge simulation, rosbag2_py in support of NASA VIPER moon lander, Virtual Ocean Robot Challenge (VORC, a smaller version of Virtual RobotX) for autonomous surface vehicles, DAVE Aquatic Virtual Environment (DAVE) for underwater manipulation, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) Long-Range Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (LRAUV) simulation, MBARI Wave Energy Converter (WEC) buoy simulation, and other open source and proprietary projects, focusing on marine robotics simulation for the past 3 years.
On the side, she serves as Associate Editor for IROS/ICRA since 2020, contributes to the US National Robotics Roadmap since 2019, organizes the ROS Maritime Working Group and meetups, and serves on the ROSCon Diversity Scholarship Committee including co-chairing 2020–2021. In her free time, she studies oceanography and enjoys coastal sea kayaking in North Shore Massachusetts.
Chris Lalancette has been in the software industry for over 20 years. During that time, he has worked on security software, kernel development, embedded development, and robotics.
For the past 7 years Chris has been a core contributor to ROS 2, working on all aspects of the stack from drivers to performance improvements. For the last 4 years he has been the ROS 2 Technical Lead, overseeing the roadmap, day-to-day development, and ROS 2 releases. He is "clalancette" on GitHub, where he is most often found.