Third Robotics and ROS in Zürich Meetup

The third robotics and ROS in Zürich meetup was organized and hosted by ICCLab on June 19th 2019. There was a good turnout from representatives in both academia and industry, totaling about 25 people in attendance. For our third meetup we had two presentations: “Perception and action planning in complex environments with ROS” by Rastislav Marko and Martin Möller from F&P Personal Robotics and “Self-calibrating camera position and grasping with Niryo arm” by Dimitrios Dimopoulos from ICCLab, ZHAW.

Summary of presentation #1: Perception and action planning in complex environments with ROS by Marko Rastislav and Martin Möller from F&P Personal Robotics

Martin Möller opened the first talk with a brief introduction of the company and one of its collaborations with ZHAW in the past. Next an overview of the hardware components of P-Rob 2R was given. This robot lies at the heart of the company’s solutions, including Lio, a mobile service robot, which was the focus of the talk. Following that, myP, the core robot library with its accompanying graphical control interface, was presented in action and a quick look at its architecture and configuration was showcased. Finally, Martin mentioned the key sensor components used by the mobile service robot.

Next, Rastislav Marko gave a rundown of the ROS components utilized for navigation and high level perception (face/speech/object recognition, body posture estimation etc.). Furthermore some ROS monitoring tools were presented along with the overall system architecture. Lastly, a case study was presented of Lio in a real hospital environment.

Summary of presentation #2: Self-calibrating camera position and grasping with Niryo arm by Dimitrios Dimopoulos from ICCLab, ZHAW

For the second part of the meetup, Dimitrios Dimopoulos gave a brief presentation on an ongoing grasping project at ICCLab. The lab’s two grasping robots were showcased along with a brief overview of the simulation environments used for evaluation. Next, the grasping chain was presented including the MoveIt library for motion planning and collision detection, and the Grasp Pose Detection library used for the grasp generation. A more detailed description of the steps necessary for grasping was given next, including camera calibration using Aruco markers, pointcloud filtering for object extraction, object mesh creation, grasp generation and motion planning. Finally, a short demonstration of grasping using the Niryo arm was given.

Closing Remarks

The event was closed with a networking session over drinks and finger food. Many thanks to F&P Robotics for sponsoring this part of the meetup.

All future events and updates can be followed by becoming a member of the Robotics and ROS in Zürich group. This was the last meetup before summer break. We’ll be back with more ROS goodies from (late) September. We look forward to continue meeting ROS-users/roboticists within the area.