micro-ROS at ROSCon 2019 Macau

Nov 1, 2019

ROSCon2019Macau ROSCon (https://roscon.ros.org) is the most important event of the ROS community. The 2019 edition was held in Macau, China. This edition has been the biggest to date with about 700 attendants.

During this year’s event, micro-ROS was present in two different ways: a talk and booths on the exhibition floor.

Talk

Ingo&BorjaPresentation During the second day, Ingo and Borja presented micro-ROS to the ROS community. They presented the current status of the framework and supplement with some rationale on why to use it and why we need microcontrollers in robots.

Exhibition

Within the exhibition floor, there were two booths with material directly related to micro-ROS, Bosch Corporate Research booth, and eProsima’s. In the Bosch booth, they had the next evolution of the micro-ROS community demo based on a Kobuki platform with different hardware setup and some premier of the upcoming updates to come.

The eProsima booth was divided into two different spaces, one dedicated to Fast RTPS, their well known DDS implementation powering ROS 2 communications. The other space was dedicated to microcontrollers development with Micro XRCE-DDS and micro-ROS as main attractions. In this “micro” area, there was a TV showing a reel presentation of micro-ROS, the video prepared by FIWARE marketing team, and PIAP’s video on benchmarking. Also, in this area, and grabbing almost all the attraction of the public, there were two different micro-ROS demonstrations:

  • A first demonstration using a Crazyflie 2.1 and sending data to the RVIz, which was visualized on the TV screen.
  • A second Crazyflie 2.1 issuing commands to a Kobuki platform to move it.

Slides

Raising interest

During the whole duration of the conference, micro-ROS attracted much attention, and the demonstration was continuously being shown and explained. Most of the visitors were already working on microcontrollers. They also had an interest in communicating with ROS 2 but struggling their way to through, that is one of the reasons why micro-ROS attracted their attention.

As final remark. Aside from members of the EU project OFERA, Renesas was showcasing the use of Micro XRCE-DDS in their RX65N MCU based platform, GR-ROSE.

Share on: