Open Robotics, the organization behind the robot operating system (ROS), announced a Technical Steering Committee (TSC) to, you guessed it, set the “technical direction for ROS 2.” That will start with determining the ROS 2 roadmap, developing core tools and libraries and establishing working groups to focus on important topics.

Open Robotics says its wants to broaden industry participation to accelerate development. Brian Gerkey, CEO of Open Robotics, shared this list of the ROS 2 TSC founding members:

Lou Amadio, Microsoft

Matt Deminico, TARDEC

Doug Fulop, Amazon

Matt Hansen, Intel

Seonman Kim, LG Electronics

Karsten Knese, Bosch

Dejan Pangercic, Apex.AI

Matt Spencer, Arm

Allison Thackston, Toyota Research Institute

Dirk Thomas, Open Robotics

Yoonseok Pyo, ROBOTIS

Open Robotics is still looking for others to join the TSC. If you’re interested in helping steer the development of ROS 2, you can either contact Open Robotics via its Discourse website or by sending an email to [email protected]

“Since the beginning of ROS, the project has been overseen and prioritized primarily by one organization, first Willow Garage and now Open Robotics,” writes Gerkey. “That approach has worked well enough, as evidenced by the widespread adoption of ROS around the world. But with ROS 2, we want to broaden participation to accelerate ROS 2 delivery … .”

Gerkey says the TSC’s first order of business is updating the roadmap 3 for the upcoming ROS 2 Crystal Clemmys release, which is scheduled for December 2018. The ROS 2 TSC also has two working groups up and running: Navigation Working Group (NWG) and Security Working Group (SWG).

“The establishment of this TSC represents a significant milestone for ROS 2 that will accelerate development on the project, while ensuring focus on the features and use cases that will have the greatest impact,” Gerkey writes.

If you want to learn more about ROS 2, ROSCon 2018, which takes place Sept. 28-29 in Madrid, is live-streaming several sessions that’ll do just that. Here’s a look at some of the talks that might interest you:

Hands-on ROS 2: A Walkthrough

Date/Time: 9/29 @ 11 AM

Speaker: Mikael Arguedas, Open Robotics, Karsten Knese, Robert Bosch LLC

Description: In this talk we show the current state of ROS 2 features through hands-on demonstrations. We guide the developer through a set of features and functionalities of ROS 2 beginning with creating a simple “hello world” package and consecutively increasing functionality. We show how to launch multiple nodes, how lifecycle nodes can be used to bootstrap a complete system, through to how the ROS 2 security features can be utilized to secure applications. This talk is meant to highlight the newly available features and tools of ROS 2 and aims to incline developers to start working with it.

Launch for ROS 2

Date/Time: 9/29 @ 12:10 PM

Speaker: William Woodall, Open Robotics

Description: Over the past half year we have been working on the new launch system for ROS 2 based on roslaunch from ROS 1. The goal of this presentation is to summarize the state of the design document for launch, describe the current state of the reference implementation, and dive into the rationale behind some of the design decisions. The attendee should come away with a deeper understanding of the differences between roslaunch from ROS 1 and the new ros2 launch tool. We’ll also have some short demonstrations to show how these differences might be useful to everyday users.

Getting involved in ROS 2 development

Date/Time: 9/29 @ 12:10 PM

Speaker: Deanna Hood, Open Robotics, Mikael Arguedas, Open Robotics

Description: Let us introduce you to the development process for ROS and how you can get involved in the ROS 2 project. We will cover a number of ways to participate, suiting a variety of profiles, including ROS 2 users looking to make their first open source contribution, organizations interested in supporting the ROS 2 project, and even experienced ROS 1 users with no time for software contributions.