The following podcast episode was recorded during the ROSCON 2019 at Macau.
Interviewing Michael Ferguson from Botnuvo for the ROS Developers Podcast
Today, I would like to dedicate the episode to those ROS developers that have been using ROS for more than 10 years. You started in the difficult days when ROS was just a seed.
Today we are going to talk with a person who has been using ROS since the beginning since he is one of the original team at Willow Garage developing it.
It is my pleasure to introduce you Michael Ferguson. Michael is the CTO and president of Botnuvo, a young robotics company that has just launched its first product. Michael started to work with ROS in 2010 as a software engineer at Willow Garage, From there, he co-founded Unbounded Robotics, the precursor of Fetch robotics. Then he moved to Fetch Robotics as CTO, and only recently he founded Botnuvo, a new company the builds robots for researchers educators and developers.
Today, I would like to dedicate the podcast to porting packages from ROS1 to ROS2. There is still a lot of work to be done, but you are making this possible. This episode is dedicated to you!
And today, it is my pleasure to introduce you Steve Macenski. Steve is open source robotics engineer lead at Samsung Research America. Before leading the open source robotics group at Samsung Research, he led the robotics team at Simbe Robotics building fully-autonomous store-auditing robot solutions. At present, He is the primary maintainer and developer of several ROS2 packages like Navigation2, Robot localisation and today’s subject of the podcast, Slam Toolbox. He is also a member of the ROS2 Technical Steering Committee. He is going to talk today about his Slam Toolbox package among other things.
Today, I would like to dedicate the episode to those ROS developers that use ROS with outdoor robots. You know that most of the ROS robots are basically indoor ones, where the level of control of the environment is a little bit higher. When you move outdoors…. Then things start to complicate a little bit more… I would even say a lot more!
I understand your suffering, and I admire your push to make outdoors robots a reality.
I dedicate this episode to you. This is my way of showing you my respect! I salute you!
Today we are going to talk with a ROS Developer that is using Nvidia Jetson board to control a 9Kg outdoors robot. It is my pleasure to introduce you Raffaello Bonghi a ROS developer using Nvidia Jetson board to build heavy outdoor robots. Raffaello is a robotics, computer vision scientist an has just changed his work to AI Technology Engineer.
Today, I would like to dedicate the episode to those ROS developers that use simulations as a key element in their ROS development. I mean, you use the simulation to test your programs until they work properly in it and then, and only then, you move to the real robot testing.
For the professional ROS developers, this podcast is dedicated to you!
And today, it is my pleasure to introduce you Olivier Michel CEO of Cyberbotics, the company that develops Webots simulator. Olivier is going to explain us, how the Webots simulator started, what are its main features, why it became open source, and how we can use it with ROS by using the webots_ros package.
Today, I would like to dedicate the podcast to those ROS developers that are creating a robotics startup based on real robots. I mean hardware!! And you make your robots based on ROS. Yeah you are the best! For the brave, this podcast is dedicated to you!
And today, it is my pleasure to introduce you Gregory Epps and Dr. Charles Galambos from React Robotics. Greg is the CEO of React Robotics and Charles is its CTO. React Robotics is a company based in London dedicated to the development of low-latency, torque-controlled, super-light robots with the aim to provide those robots to researchers so they can concentrate on testing the best artificial intelligence algorithms in physical robots.
ROS (Robot Operating System) is now very popular among roboticists. Researchers, hobbyists, and even robotics companies are using it, promoting it and supporting it. However, it was not always like that. Do you know ROS history? In the early days, ROS was an unknown only used by a bunch of robotics freaks. How did ROS reach its current state as a robotics standard? Let’s see in this podcast how ROS got to its current superior status.
