Acceleration Robotics organised the third ROS Developers India Meet in Delhi to create a cohesive community of roboticists in India
After the successful meet-ups in Pune and Bangalore, Acceleration Robotics held another ROS Developers Meet-up at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology Delhi in collaboration with Peer Robotics. 190+ people registered for the event with working professionals making up half of the attendees. The meet-up was held on Saturday 29th April from 10 AM to 1 PM and was attended by 100 people.
The opening address was given by Professor SK Saha, Project Director of IHFC i.e. I-Hub Foundation for Cobotics, explaining their vision and the various robotics activities happening at IIT Delhi. Prateek Nagras, CEO at Acceleration Robotics, then gave a brief intro to ROS 2 and explained how ROS 2 is getting more industrial traction.
This was followed by Alok Kumar, CoFounder and Head of Tech at Peer Robotics, explaining the approaches to achieving Human Robot Interaction using ROS. He also walked through designing an HRI example. Alok mentioned that most modern systems now use a hybrid approach combining rule based systems with machine learning techniques.
The next talk was given by Aditya Mulgundkar, a robotics researcher at IIIT Hyderabad. He presented DroneForce, a framework for designing custom controllers for drones using ROS. He explained how DroneForce bridges the gap and abstracts away low level details for controls engineers so that they can simply setup a controller and don't have to rely on the clunky code generation provided by Simulink/MATLAB.
Jasmeet Singh and Naman Malik, robotics engineers at Acceleration Robotics, presented their work on creating environmental artefacts for sensors and creating environments using satellite images in Ignition Gazebo. They presented how to create rain effect and lens flare for the sensors and this work will be added as a feature to the next release of Ignition Gazebo.
Apoorva Gupta came on stage next and gave an overview of Rust, which has risen in popularity over the past few years, and explained why it is a viable option for robotics development. She mentioned that even though Rust has many advantages like faster build times and better memory safety, there is a lack of necessary tooling within the ROS ecosystem for it to be widely adopted.
Lastly, we had Arjun K Haridas, admin at A.T.O.M Robotics Club, going over the club's beginnings at the Maharaja Agrasen Institute of Technology and how they have built a strong robotics community by taking part in many public events like hackathons and serving as partners for many industrial collaborators. It was nice to see such an organic but also well organised community effort, and we would like to thank the members of A.T.O.M to come to the event and making it a success.
This is the link to all the presentations.
Overall, the event further reinforced our belief in creating this ecosystem which is why we are partnering with Rigbetel Labs to do ROS India Summit 2.0. Pallavi Saha, Co-Founder at Rigbetel Labs, gave a recap of the last ROS India Summit and showed our plans for this year’s event. We plan to host this event in July and are actively seeking sponsorships/partnerships for the same.
