Thank you, Katherine. I would very much like to take you up on that offer.
I am planning to hold a kickoff for this community group shortly after the LogiMat fair, targeting the first week of April. In the meantime, a number of companies and individuals have already been in touch, and some encouraging early conversations are already underway — including a visit from the MedKit team to our lab in Nuremberg today, which proved to be very productive.
These early discussions are already surfacing interesting cross-industry parallels, particularly between automotive and industrial automation. I would like to continue with one-on-one calls in the lead-up to the kickoff, to better understand the broader landscape and gather a range of perspectives.
Goals for the Kickoff & Project
Long-term vision: The ambition is for this to eventually become part of core ROS features — not with the expectation of having all the answers on day one, but because the ROS community deserves reliable, out-of-the-box tooling that the entire community can adopt without friction.
Knowledge sharing: Present Siemens’ current findings in this space and gather structured feedback from interested community members.
Governance: In response to @gavanderhoorn’s point — I would prefer this initiative to be hosted under OSRF rather than driven by any individual company or startup. That conversation is perhaps best had once there is something tangible to present. I would also welcome input on whether IP clarity needs to be established early to encourage broader participation.
Consolidation: Establish a common framework for the currently fragmented tooling landscape, allowing teams to focus on building with robots rather than continuously evaluating or adapting tools.
Collaboration-first approach: This effort is driven by the problem space rather than any preference for existing platforms — all forms of collaboration are welcome.
I look forward to connecting with more of you ahead of the kickoff. Please do not hesitate to reach out if you would like to arrange a call.
Not sure why you talk about “closed”, “money” and “Apple Store”. All I was hinting at was that there already are a few platforms and tools for full-stack robotics, incl. rosbridge, foxglove-bridge, and, yes, Transitive (the one I created), all of which are nicely cataloged in https://robotwebtools.github.io/. Zenoh is pretty usable across devices as well, I think. So I’m trying to understand the need for yet another one, rather than improving the existing. This question is now being answered and discussed in PlotJuggler Bridge Released, thanks.
@flo I think it would be a good agenda item – maybe not for the first meeting, but later – to go over these options and discuss their pros and cons. There used to be a working community group around the robot web tools a few years ago, but we aren’t meeting anymore, mostly because of a lack of concrete “collaboration material” – no real outcome or work product the group was collaborating on. There are some lessons to be learned from that.
Fair enough. As I answered in that thread, I think it has some technical differences that make it a valuable alternative, but I actually did TWICE the work to provide BOTH a client to my bridge and theFoxglove one.
If people prefer the former… that is fine
Another question is why am I investing money and time into PlotJuggler, when Rerun and Foxglove exist. Sometimes you just… do things, because you have a vision or passion. But people don’t necessary share the same vision, and that’s ok
Also, so that is clear to you and the reader, I think Transitive Robotics is great! I equally like open source software and commercial one, when they solve my problem!
That screenshot reminds me of the good old days of custom Winamp skins. I would love to see what this kind of UI craftsmanship could do for diagnostics data. If you ever feel like adding a ros2_medkit view to your platform, ping me. We already have a light theme though, so at least we got that going for us
