ROSCon Blog 2022

Pre ROSCon dinner — Photo from Pre-ROSCon dinner party (from right-left: Tully Foote, Gajamohan Mohanarajah, me, Steven Ragnarok, Michael Carroll and other attendees)

In 2022, I got the chance to attend ROSCon 2022 at Kyoto, Japan in person. This was a big deal for me. I've been using ROS since 2017 and have always wanted to attend ROSCon. I've also wanted to visit Japan, as I've heard so much about it from a close friend who lives there. In fact I made plans to visit Japan in 2020, which was sadly cancelled because of COVID-19.

Luckily, this year, I received scholarship from Open Robotics covering all expenses to attend the conference and it exceeded my expectations in all ways possible.

Posing next to the ROSCon 2022 poster — Flexing next to the ROSCon poster

Most rewarding part about ROSCon was being able to meet so many robotics engineers. Back in Mumbai, the robotics or founder community isn't as good and I used ROS Discourse working group meetings and other forums to interact and get involved with similar folks. It was good to see the faces behind those usernames and talk to them. Through lunch breaks, reception and Karaoke nights I made quite a few friends!

Among all the products I saw, I am super impressed by Foxglove and Formant. As a robotics engineer, I know people spend half their time in tooling and products like Foxglove are a great help on focusing on what truly matters. I recently also had a chance to talk to the Woeden team, who are working on a dev tools product which I think is super useful. In fact, I wrote a LinkedIn post about it back in 2021.

I also got a chance to see Stretch from Hello Robot for the first time and it's a really well engineered product.

It seems obvious that launching a semi-autonomous or remotely teleoperated version of your product is the way to go. It helps generate revenue faster, keep dev cycles short and quick and gather real world data. Tools should allow annotating while taking the teleoperated action. Dev tools and devops for robotics has significant cracks and is looking for products.

I liked the talks on multi-robot deployments and MCAP

I could see it in the details that Open Robotics worked hard for organizing the event and did a great job. The talks and other events went smoothly and on time. And they took good care of labeling food items as well, which is a big deal for me as a vegetarian. I'll definitely be attending ROSCon in New Orleans in 2023!