ROS-Industrial. Technologies, Trends, Applications

Established already in robotics research, the open source "Robot Operation System (ROS)" is getting more and more interesting for industrial applications. ROS offers a multitude of intelligent software components, e.g. for 2D-vision and 3D-point cloud sensor processing, as well as robot motion planning. Transferring these capabilities to industrial platforms could revolutionize robotic manufacturing applications. ROS-Industrial will enable more and more flexible automation solutions with exchangeable components that are able to cope with dynamic environments and a large diversity of objects to be handled. Although ROS bears a huge potential, there are still some draw backs in comparison to established proprietary industrial software: little long-term evaluations of ROS on shop floors with respect to non-functional requirements like robustness, safety and dependability, no guaranteed support. The ROS-Industrial initiative founded in 2012 aims at eliminating these draw backs and at tapping the full potential of ROS for industrial robotics. In this conference organized by Fraunhofer IPA, current trends, technologies and experiences from industrial use cases within the European ROS-Industrial community are presented.