Hi all,
To keep MoveIt 2 healthy, we are looking for additional maintainers and core contributors.
Like many ROS packages, MoveIt 2 is currently experiencing a growing backlog of issues and pull requests. Unfortunately, this has increasingly outstripped the level of commercial sponsorship and volunteer involvement.
At PickNik, we have shifted our primary engineering focus to MoveIt Pro, our commercial offering. The goal to ship commercially reliable mobile manipulation software has unsurprisingly required significant re-engineering beyond the initial focus of the MoveIt project. In the future we hope to release a MoveIt 3 open source version to better serve academic and early stage startups, but at present it is not viable. In the meantime, we will continue to maintain the MoveIt 2 website and GitHub organization as well as contribute fixes to the ROS and MoveIt libraries we are still leveraging.
If your company uses MoveIt, please consider asking if you can contribute effort in some fashion. Maintainers internal and external to PickNik (About | MoveIt) have merge access and our contribution guide is outlined here (Contributing | MoveIt).
You can also make a big impact in the issue tracker. Even spending a few minutes skimming new issues over coffee/tea can make a difference and help keep the project responsive.
For those involved in the project, we’d like to have a discussion on where efforts are best focused (Debian releases? Runtime regression issues? Submitted PRs?). We’re proposing meeting Invalid date via https://meet.google.com/fpo-srqg-feg.
Whether you are a MoveIt maintainer or a user, if you are serious about being involved but cannot make the proposed time, please reach out to me directly at nathanbrooks@picknik.ai. Thank you for being part of the MoveIt community!