Robot Skin Special Interest Group (SIG) Announcement

[Isura Ranatunga]

​Dear ROS Community,

In recent years there have been many great developments in robotic skin and coverings. These include embedded tactile, infrared, temperature, and accelerometer elements among others. Several projects have made considerable contributions to developing full body multi-modal skin sensors. This increased activity is exciting for the robotic skin community and it makes standardization of methods and procedures increasingly important.

Although there is vast experience in the area of robotic skin research, there is a lack of common tools and common standards in robot middleware and robot simulators.

To address the need for common tools and interfaces in ROS and Gazebo, and the larger need for standardization of communication, display, and message formats etc. we propose forming a Robot Skin Special Interest Group (SIG) within the ROS community to openly discuss and collaboratively solve some of these issues.

We have created an initial page for the SIG at http://wiki.ros.org/sig/RobotSkin and the corresponding Google group at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ros-sig-robot-skin.

Please consider joining the Robot Skin SIG and contribute to the discussions!

Best Regards, 

Isura 

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Isura Ranatunga 

PhD Student

Next Generation Systems (NGS) Research Group 

University of Texas at Arlington Research Institute (UTARI) 

7300 Jack Newell Blvd. S. 

Fort Worth, TX 76118 

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