This is the community landing page for the Open Source Robotics Foundation's Special Interest Group for Interoperability. Our mission is to discuss and promote the objective of making robotics systems and relevant infrastructure (both software and hardware) interoperable. Interoperable can mean components are interchangeable or it can mean different systems work together correctly and with minimal friction.

Monthly meetings will be held at this Zoom link.

A recurring event can be found for the interest group on the Official OSRF Events Calendar.

Meetings will usually take place on the first Thursday of each month. Check the agenda directory for specific plans for upcoming sessions.

To reach as many time zones as possible, sessions are scheduled at 15:00 UTC+0. To give an idea of the spread, this would be the usual session time for various time zones:

• 07:00 Pacific Time (west coast of USA)
• 10:00 Eastern Time (east coast of USA)
• 16:00 Central European Time
• 20:30 Indian Standard Time
• 23:00 UTC+8 (China, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia)

As much as possible, we would like the agenda of our sessions to be driven by what the community is interested in. If there are topics around interoperability that you'd like to see highlighted, please open an issue ticket in this repository explaining what you would like to see covered. If you are interested in presenting on a relevant topic, feel free to open an issue ticket or leave a comment on someone else's ticket to volunteer. You may also contact [email protected] to volunteer as a presenter.

We envision a few different formats for sessions that we would like to arrange:

One invited expert presents on a relevant topic and provides a Q&A at the end of the session.

Multiple invited experts on one topic (or multiple related topics) give brief presentations according to each of their own expertises and then take questions from the audience in facilitated discussion.

We decide on a topic ahead of time, and then any interested community members volunteer ahead of time to give a short ~3-5 minute presentation sharing their thoughts or relevant work on the topic. After all prearranged presentations are finished, we facilitate an open discussion on the topic.

Similar to a roundtable, but with a more strictly enforced 3 minute time limit and no constraints on topic except that it cannot violate the ROS Community Code of Conduct. Preferably the topic of each talk should be relevant to people who care about interoperability, but we will humor a loose interpretation of that criteria. Leave a comment here to express your interest in sharing a lightning talk.