ROSCon 2017

September 1, 2017

ROSCon 2017 is a chance for ROS developers of all levels, beginner to expert, to spend an extraordinary two days learning from and networking with the ROS community. Get tips and tricks from experts and meet and share ideas with fellow developers.

ROSCon is a developers conference, in the model of PyCon and BoostCon. Following the success of the past five annual ROSCons, this year’s ROSCon will be held in Vancouver, Canada. Similar to previous years, the two-day program will comprise technical talks and tutorials that will introduce you to new tools and libraries, as well as teach you more about the ones you already know. The bulk of the program will be 30-40 minute presentations (some may be longer or shorter).

We aim for ROSCon to represent the entire ROS community, which is global and diverse. Whoever you are, whatever you do, and wherever you do it, if you’re interested in ROS, then we want you to join us at ROSCon. We encourage women, members of minority groups, and members of other under-represented groups to attend ROSCon. We expect all attendees to follow our code of conduct.

The ROSCon planning committee acknowledges that the barriers to attendance for traditionally under-represented groups may be many and varied, and we are striving throughout the planning process to make the event as inclusive and accessible as possible. This year we are proud to continue the ROSCon Diversity Scholarship Program to help make ROSCon 2017 more representative of the global ROS community.

We also welcome suggestions for what else we can do to encourage more participation. Contact us if you have ideas that you’d like to share.

If you don’t want to make a formal presentation, you should still bring your new project or idea to ROSCon and present it in a lightning talk.

There will be an opportunity to give a lightning talk at ROSCon. These are 2-3 minute talks, one session each day (3 minutes in the past but this may be reducing to 2.5 or 2 minutes this year). The way that it works is that you find the designated person during the morning coffee break to sign up for a slot to present that afternoon. It’s first come, first served, and it always fills up. As part of the sign-up, you have the option to provide 2-3 presentation slides that will be loaded onto a common laptop for presentation. Slides are not required, and there’s no particular format. Though it must work on the coordinators laptop so common portable formats such as pdfs are recommended. Videos are also ok but should be edited to fit inside the time limit and should not rely on the audio from the video. Given the time constraint, we would recommend against trying to do a live demo. Last years talks can be seen in this blog post or browse the recordings from past years.

There will also be open space for impromptu hacking sessions and informal presentations.

If you are looking for information on past ROSCons, including past programs, slides and videos of the presentations, see their separate websites.

—Event Producer