New Organizer for Maritime Community Working Group

Community Groups Marine Robotics
1

The call for a new organizer for the ROS Maritime Community Working Group (CWG) has concluded. Thank you to all those who expressed interest - your willingness to commit to the community is really appreciated!!

Let us welcome the new organizer, Isaac Vandor! From his website:

I am currently a Robotics Software Engineer in the Deep Submergence Lab at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. I am the lead developer and maintainer for WHOIDSL software, with code running on HOV Alvin, ROV JASON, and AUV Sentry.
I design and develop new capabilities for our ROS software ecosystem in addition to GUIs and other tools for operator interaction.

Isaac has been a long-term member of the CWG, and is currently active in initiating an OpenOcean.Software open source marine robotics ecosystem (an NSF POSE ecosystem covered in a previous CWG meeting), which includes and aligns well with the ROS maritime community. We think these overlapping roles put Isaac in a good position to foster the awareness, utility, and stable maintenance of both communities.

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) has been one of the early adopters of ROS 1 and 2 in the marine robotics community. We hope its development and field experience will translate to further open source involvement and benefit the ROS developer community.

We look forward to the next chapter of the ROS Maritime CWG with Isaac’s contribution and new ideas!

Mabel Zhang (@mabelzhang) & Evan Palmer (@evan-palmer)
ROS Maritime CWG Co-organizers

3 Likes
2

Hi everyone!

Thank you Mabel for the intro and for all of yours and Evan’s work shepherding the CWG the last couple of years. I have been a daily ROS user and developer since my earliest days learning robotics and I have watched the powerful impact ROS can have across academia and industry, especially in flattening the learning curve for new users and speeding up the time from development to integration of new ideas, instruments, and more.

As Mabel mentioned, I am involved in a number of efforts to further develop the marine robotics open source ecosystem and hope to bring the ideas we’ve gathered through those efforts into the working group going forward. With the holidays fast approaching, I’m hoping to pick a new time and restart regular working group meetings in the new year.

In the meantime, feel free to reach out and say hi over on Zulip chat: Public view of Open Source Robotics Foundation | Zulip team chat

Cheers,
Isaac Vandor (@ivandor)

3 Likes