ROS By-The-Bay July Meetup: Open Sauce Pre-Game w.s.g. NeoBotics Foundation

ROS By-The-Bay is the Bay Area's only meetup exclusively for Robot Operating System (ROS) users! We're back after a brief hiatus related to ICRA and Automate. This month we're gearing up for Open Sauce in San Mateo and we have some friends from the Neobotics Foundation visiting from the East Coast and Midwest!

We'll be at our regular Google X location at 250 West Mayfield Avenue in Mountain View!

Our speakers this month are from the Neobotics Foundation, a new 501(c)3 non-profit aiming to teach the next generation of engineers the fundamentals of robotics and vehicle autonomy by building and distributing open source hardware autonomous RC cars for events like RoboRacer and DonkeyCar. The Neobotics Foundations's new NeoRacer 2 platform supports both ROS 2 and Autoware out of the box and they're looking to make the process of learning robotics fundamentals easy and fun.

Our speakers will be:

• Koneshka Dey -- Founder & CEO of Neobotics Foundation --
  Koneshka taught the Autonomous RACECAR course at MIT Beaver Works Summer Institute for three years and worked at Boston University's Cyber-Physical Systems Lab on self-driving cars and reinforcement learning for racing. Koneshka also founded and led the team that took second place at the Roboracer competition. The problems we hit there, and realizing almost everyone in the community shared them, are what led to Neobotics. The biggest one was simple: nobody sold a pre-assembled car.
• Bassel El Mabsout -- Chief Science Officer Neobotics Foundation --
  Bassel earned his PhD in Robotics at Boston University, where he focused on reinforcement learning. His research helps roboticists translate high-level objectives into robust learned behaviors, especially on resource-constrained systems. By combining techniques from programming languages and machine learning, he builds controllers that hold up in the real world, with an emphasis on principled adaptation and sim-to-real transfer so that learned behavior survives deployment.
• Katherine Scott -- Developer Advocate OSRA -- Kat will give an overview of the recent ROS 2 Lyrical Luth release and give a roundup of observations from Open Hardware Summit, ICRA, and Automate.