ROS Meetup #5 Reload

The ROS Meetup is finally returning and it's time to see each other again in person, rather than through a computer screen. Let's come together and revive the robotics community!

This is a fantastic opportunity to meet new people from the industry, hear about the problems that others are facing and the solutions they are developing. There will be a total of three talks during this event.

Location: Christoph-Rapparini-Bogen 23, 80639 München, JetBrains Office(JetBrains Event Space)

Agenda:
5:30pm - Doors Open
6:00pm - "maliput - a road network framework for autonomous driving simulation and validation" by Agustin Alba Chicar from Ekumen
6:30pm - "Tricycle Controller with ros2_control" by Tony Najjar Robotics Software Engineer at Pixel Robotics and Johannes Plapp CTO of Pixel Robotics
7:00pm - "Lessons learned from running a robotics startup" by Dr. Moritz Tenorth, CTO of Magazino and Lukas Zanger, COO of Magazino
7:30pm - Networking and demos until the last person leaves

Demos:

• Marco Boneberger from Frank Emika will demonstrate what can be achieved when ROS is combined with a cutting-edge robot that can be controlled in a 1 millisecond loop.
  The demo is the result of a paper from TU Munich that was presented at IROS 2022.

If you're a startup and would like to bring physical materials for demonstrations (such as posters, sensors or robots), please contact the organizer in email provided below. It's possible and encouraged to showcase something on-site, but without heavily "selling" your product.

This will be a recurring event, so if you're interested in speaking at a future meetup, fill out the survey in the provided link: https://forms.gle/bJRPu8ECTaBKZJoZ8. The location of the meetup will change each time and if you're a company interested in providing a venue or have any other inquiries, please contact the provided email address. Collaboration ideas are welcomed!
Contact email: me@alexkaravaev.xyz.

More detailed description of talks:

maliput - a road network framework for autonomous driving simulation and validation:
Road networks are at the core of autonomous driving. Agents (i.e., cars) that plan routes along roads need to be able to query the network, from basic geometric questions to more advanced concepts like physical constraints and dynamic rules. For example, an agent might want to find maximum-clearance, safe routes for different vehicle types and loadings. Maliput addresses this need by providing a library for representing road networks and answering queries about them. These networks can be expressed in many different formats, with OpenDRIVE and Lanelet2 being two popular examples. Whatever the format, Maliput provides a consistent API for interacting with the underlying data structure. This talk aims to present the API capabilities, the extent of its implementation and design choices as well as future work together with demostrations showing the power of this library.

Tricycle Controller with ros2_control:
This talk will present the Tricycle Controller that was developed specifically for Pixel Robotics's Pixel PT (pallet-picking AMR), using the ros2_control framework.
Here are some headlines we want to touch on:

• general introduction to ros2_control
• Input/output of the controller
• core controller logic and the math behind it (wheel commands generation and odometry)
• extra features (e.g rate limiting)

https://github.com/ros-controls/ros2_controllers/tree/master/tricycle_controller

Lessons learned from running a robotics startup:
This talk will share the lessons learned from the trials and tribulations of scaling and running a robotics startup for 8 years. We'll delve together into the challenges faced and the solutions implemented, from an initial non-scalable garage solution to a reliable technology stack that is currently serving real customers.