IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - June 2011 - 122

Figure 1. A robot detecting objects.

be manipulated, as shown in Figure 1,
which shows a scene with four objects
and a result of a multiobject segmentation. The strength of a robotic approach to cognitive vision comes from
the fact that a robot can act to confirm
a hypothesized
* functionality.
The success of a vision
Another interesting area is
system in a robot is
dealing with obrelated to the success
jects that change
their appearance
of the task.
shape over
* and
the course of an
action being applied to them. Examples include a cracked egg or hacked

ROS Topics

about the ongoing activities in the
field, and serving as a contact point
for researchers planning to get in
to the research field.
Members of the TC benefit by getting relevant information (for example, about workshops, publication
venues, and potential collaboration
partners) and joining discussions of
the future of the field. The current
chairs of the TC are Danica Kragic
and Ville Kyrki. If you are interested
in the activities or joining the TC,
contact one of the chairs or visit the
TC Web site at http://www.csc.kth.se/
danik/RAS.

*
(continued from page 18)

nothing. Using this test, ROS Build 2
is about 100 times faster than the original ROS Build. Additional, significant speedup comes due to increased
parallelism. On modern computers
with many cores, using make's "-j8"
option can allow eight files to be compiled on eight cores all at once. Tools
such as CMake can take advantage of
this if they have broad visibility but
will not be able to make full use of all
the cores when limited to serially considering one package at a time.
Originally, ROS was designed with
the PR2 robot in mind, and the system has had great success across
multiple robots. However, requirements change as ROS is ported to
new robots, operating systems and

122

cucumber. Almost no research has
been performed yet in this area. The
current rapid developments in many
of the action capabilities, such as
manipulation skills, also fuel the
research in robot vision.
The technical committee (TC) on
computer and robot vision aims at
bringing together researchers sharing
interest in robot vision and promoting
discussion between computer vision
and robotics communities. Activities
include organizing tutorials and workshops in both computer vision and
robotics conferences, editing special
issues in journals, creating periodic
innovation summaries, informing

IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

compilers. The out-of-source build
(wherein the process of building
software does not mutate the source
tree at all) is an important technique
for the developer and integrator and
will be supported by ROS Build 2.
The out-of-source build makes cleaning up extremely easy (rm -r), allows
one to simultaneously compile with
multiple compilers (including cross
compilers), and generally makes integration tasks easier.
In addition to building in a separate directory, ROS Build 2 also enables install and package targets via
CMake's utility CPack. Install targets
lead to smaller Debian packages (.debs)
and make it easier to package ROS on
other Linux distributions such as

JUNE 2011

RedHat, since taking a more standard
approach makes the job of package
maintainers easier across all distributions. This in turn will make it easier for
the ROS to be downloaded and installed
on more systems.
ROS is a community resource
that helps robotics developers'
work together to be as productive as
possible. The build system has been a
workhorse of ROS, making it easy to
extend the system and distribute the
improvements. The new build system
supports the community by making
code sharing better: making builds
more efficient and making it easier
than ever to bring up ROS on a new
platform.

http://www.csc.kth.se/

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - June 2011