Ever since I returned to Seattle, I have missed the vibrant robotics meetup scene of the Bay Area. So I attended a couple of meetups in the area and found the following ones particularly interesting:

Then, in December 2020, I learned that the ROS Seattle Meetup was looking for a new organizer so Vaibhav Phadnis and I stepped up. We liked the previous meetup format, with technical talks for the first half and networking for the second half. Due to COVID, we needed everything to be virtual, so we used Zoom for talks and Gather for networking sessions. While virtual networking wasn’t as great, the ability to invite speakers from anywhere on earth was awesome. Throughout 2021, we hosted about seven of these events, and we were able to record the last four (see “Recorded Talks” below). Unfortunately, I was unable to continue hosting in 2022 due to personal reasons.

This experience also made me think about what I was looking for when organizing ROS Seattle Meetup events. I wanted to:

  1. Create a community for robotics software engineers, whether they are using ROS or not–there is no non-ROSCon.
  2. Connect with those who are working on framework and infrastructure related projects. There are academic conferences for those working on core algorithms.
  3. Figure outwhat’s special about robotics software engineers in Seattle/Pacific Northwest. For example, Seattle is known for cloud (and ML?). Is there a theme that represents robotics engineering here?

Recorded Talks