Fraunhofer IPA to initiate a European ROS Industrial Consortium

Fraunhofer IPA takes up the ROS Industrial Initiative and plans to create a European ROS-Industrial Consortium, in collaboration with the North American Consortium led by SwRI.

The two Consortia will address the differing needs of the European and North American markets, while both will still collaborate at a high level. The two organizations will work together on common development tasks, but may have different methods of operation, budgets, and structure.

ROS is an open-source project providing a common framework of software libraries and tools for a wide range of robotic applications. In recent years, adoption has grown exponentially, and ROS is evolving as the predominant software platform in robotics research, in the United States as well as Europe. Leading research institutions are applying ROS to 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.

“Following other successful open-source projects as models, SwRI is initiating a precompetitive commercial collaborative research consortium, exclusively focused on the needs of industrial robot users,” said Paul Evans, director of SwRI's Manufacturing Systems Department.

“Prerequisites for European industry to apply ROS, however, are quality assurance, long-term code stability, interoperability with existing components and tool chains and a distinct and reliable contact point for support. This is where ROS Industrial comes in…” stated Prof. Verl, head of Fraunhofer IPA.
About Southwest Research Institute
Southwest Research Institute® (SwRI®), headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, is one of the oldest and largest independent, nonprofit, applied research and development organizations in the United States.

SwRI's 11 technical divisions offer a wide range of technical expertise and services in such areas as chemistry, space science, nondestructive evaluation, automation, engine design, mechanical engineering, electronics and more.

Contact:
clay.flannigan@swri.org

About Fraunhofer IPA
Finding solutions to organizational and technological challenges, particularly within the production environment of industrial enterprises. That, in a nutshell, is the key focus of the research and development work carried out at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA. With 14 individual departments engaged in the fields of Corporate Organization, Automation and Surface Engineering, our R&D projects aim to enhance production processes and make products more cost-effective and environmentally friendly by identifying and exploiting the potential for automation and streamlining at clients’ companies. This helps to strengthen their international competitiveness.

Contact:
Florian Weißhardt
phone +49 711 970-1046
florian.weisshardt@ipa.fraunhofer.de,
Ulrich Reiser
phone +49 711 970-1330
ulrich.reiser@ipa.fraunhofer.de