Alexander Perzylo

European Robotics Week 2011 (Update)

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Update (Jan 05, 2012):
More than 100 people joined the introduction to RoboEarth and the interactive workshops. They created and detected their first 3D object models using the RoboEarth platform. We want to thank everyone who helped to organize the successfull event as well as all participants who showed their interest.

euRobotics Week

RoboEarth will present itself as part of the European Robotics Week from November 28th - December 4th, 2011.
Therefore the RoboEarth team will set up a live webcast on Friday, December 2nd, 2011, starting from 15.00 (CET).

Dr. Oliver Zweigle is going to present a brief introduction to the concepts of RoboEarth. Subsequently, an interactive workshop will be held. The aim for the workshop is to let anyone interested try out the RoboEarth software to build 3D object models themselves and use them to detect the described objects.

The workshop's prerequisites and details on how to register can be found at webcast. Registration will be open until November 20th, 2011. The webcast itself will also be made available through this website.

Alexander Perzylo

RoboEarth's First Open Source Release

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We are happy to announce RoboEarth's first open source software release. This release allows you to create 3D object models and upload them to RoboEarth. It also allows you to download any model stored in RoboEarth and detect the described object using a Kinect or a webcam.

If you are familiar with ROS, creating and using object models is easy. As shown in the video tutorial above, it uses three main packages:

  • RoboEarth's re_object_recorder package allows you to create your own 3D object model using Microsoft's Kinect sensor. By recording and merging point clouds gathered from different angles around the object, a detailed model is created, which may be shared with the world by uploading it to RoboEarth.
  • RoboEarth's re_kinect_object_detector package allows you to detect models you download from RoboEarth using a Kinect.
  • Alternatively, you may also use RoboEarth's re_vision package to detect objects using a common RGB camera.

A complete overview of the process can be found at http://www.ros.org/wiki/roboearth
RoboEarth aims at creating an object database including semantic descriptors. Semantic descriptors allow robots to not only detect objects, but reason about them. For example, if a robot is asked to serve a drink, semantic object descriptors allow the robot to determine if all required objects are available or if an additional object model is missing, and if a missing model is available via RoboEarth. You can help us with that process by supplying meaningful names and descriptions for the objects you create.

We are looking forward to your feedback in the comments below or at info at roboearth.org.

Alexander Perzylo

RoboEarth at ICRA 2011

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The RoboEarth team made the effort to build a nice demo for ICRA2011. The project's Object Recorder was presented at the RoboEarth booth, showing how to build 3d models of objects and share them through RoboEarth with ease. The demo attracted a lot of interest and feedback, as visitors could use the system themselves in order to build models of arbitrary objects and make them available worldwide in an instant.

A visitor using the object recorder system

For this purpose a low cost sensor was used: the Microsoft Kinect.

Garden gnome and its 3d model

The object under investigation has to be placed on a marker table, that holds the following pattern: marker_template. It is important to print it out the same size (marker edge length of 80.0 mm). This AR markers are used to register the point cloud for the model from different views without any expensive computations. The software used for the demo is part of the RoboEarth open source software initiative and will be released among other software components in July 2011. The shared object models can be downloaded and used by robots and other intelligent systems to recognize objects, they didn't know about before.