[FOSDEM] Call for participation: Robotics and Simulation Room at FOSDEM 2025

[Lucas Chiesa]

We're excited to announce the first Robotics and Simulation devroom at
FOSDEM 2025, scheduled for Sunday, February 2nd!

Summary
-------------

A Robotics and Simulation dev room at FOSDEM, focused on core robotics
libraries, frameworks, simulation tools, and open-source platforms.
The selected talks  will cover key tools like ROS and Gazebo,
showcasing advancements and projects in the field. The half-day event
will feature four presentations and a lightning talk session, offering
a platform for developers to share work and foster collaboration.

Scope of Talks
--------------------

Because of the varied and interdisciplinary nature of robotics as a
field, plenty of topics could fit a ‘Robotics and Simulation’ devroom.
To help the speakers target their presentations to a specific
audience, and to minimize the overlap with other established FOSDEM
devrooms, we defined the scope of this devroom by listing key areas of
interest:

* Core robotics libraries and applications. Mapping, planning,
localization, perception, and control solutions would fit this
category. For example, Cartographer, OMPL, grid_map, Octomap, PCL,
OpEn, OpenRMF
* Frameworks used when building robotics applications, being robotic
specific tools, or generic tools used for robotics applications.
Examples include ROS, Dora-RS, OpenRR, YARP, Zenoh, and Eclipse
iceoryx
* Specific robotic simulation software like Gazebo, Coppelia, or
simulations using non robotic specific tools, like Bevy, Godot.
* Robotic-specific devops and related tooling, like webviz, MCAP
* Robotics platforms friendly for open source development, like
Andino, Crazyflie, Turtlebot.
* Robotic products implemented using open source software. This can
include examples of AI methods used to teach robots to perform certain
tasks, or controlling robots using LLMs. For example, dora-rs, ros2ai,
robo-gym

The examples mentioned are meant to be descriptive and not restricted.
Talks could be improvements to any of the mentioned packages,
interesting uses of them, alternatives with different degrees of
maturity, or totally unrelated to them.

Submission instructions
--------------------------------

https://pretalx.fosdem.org/fosdem-2025/cfp

Dates:
* Deadline: 1st December 2024
* Accepted talks notification: 6th December 2024

Formats:
* 20 mins + 5 mins for Q&A
* 5 min lightning talks

Please choose “Robotics and Simulation” as the “Track” when submitting
your talk and add a note to specify 20 min or 5 min lightning talk.

Committee
---------------

Arnaud Taffanel (Bitcraze)
Fred Gurr (Eclipse Foundation)
Lucas Chiesa (Ekumen)
Kimberly McGuire (Bitcraze)
Mat Sadowski (Weekly Robotics)