The discussion seems to be centered around a discussion thread: Proposed standard interface for aerial vehicles in ROS
Many common UAV messages are already available in the std_msgs package, so it looks like effort has focused on developing REPs (105, then 147) to codify best-practices.
This discussion is showing that ROS is less mature for underwater vehicles-- which makes sense, that thread is older than the marine robotics SIG! Presumably some combination of REPs and AUV-specific message standardization is required. Some code development for rviz plugins and/or common drivers would really help drive adoption.
I’m just concerned that if ROS adopts a few messages without broader community involvement we’ll continue a lot of very isolated development. We just wrote yet another RDI DVL parser because none of the existing messages-- including the one proposed-- meets our needs. We’re at least the second group well-suited to being long-term maintainers of such a package to do that in the last 18 months.
Maybe we should try to identify a venue for an underwater robotics ROS workshop? A lot of the new stakeholders are new to open-source software, not just ROS. Many of them don’t even comment on the mailing list.