Maintainer Meeting Recap - August 15th

MoveIt
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Topics

  • Beginning ROS 2.0 efforts - Ian
  • Ending Jade support and forking for Lunar - Isaac
  • World MoveIt! Day 2017 - Dave
  • STOMP Cost Maps
  • Generalize IK parameters
  • OMPL Updates
  • Agile Grasps
  • New maintainers
  • New MoveIt! website

Attendees

  • Michael ‘v4hn’ Görner
  • Robert Haschke
  • Isaac IY Saito
  • Jorge Nicho
  • G.A. vd. Hoorn
  • Dave Coleman
  • Ian McMahon
  • Bence Magyar
  • Jonathan Binney
  • Mark Moll

Summary

  • ROS 2.0:

    • Challenges
      • Robot representation file to be decided in the future.
      • Communication layer
      • ROS parameters no supported
    • Action items
      • Using the bridge as an initial step. Have verification from OSRF
      • Separate branch to be created for changes related to ROS 2.0 transition

  • Lunar branch

    • Create new branch for large feature changes
    • Freezing jade
    • Continue cherry – picking into indigo, kinetic

  • World MoveIt! Day

    • After ROS Con, maybe week after ICRA, tentative date 10th of October.

  • OMPL replacement interface (Mark Moll):

    • Current Features
      • Planning with Cost functions
      • Existing Cost function framework in OMPL
    • In progress features

  • STOMP Cost Maps (Bence):

    • Too many Assumptions in both the MoveIt! and STOMP frameworks.
    • Fixing start state is limiting.
    • Bence to compile list of issues

  • IK parameters:

    • Parameters exposure is lacking
    • Alternatives include using generic structure with downcasting or passing a function callback

  • MoveIt! Website face lift

    • Setup a Bounty source account for funding this effort?

  • Agile Grasp Generator

    • Integration in MoveIt! in progress
    • No general perception tool in MoveIt! to supplement grasping functionality.

  • Pull Requests

    • Maintainers to look at PR list more frequently.
    • Four eyes principle for merging unless change is insignificant (e.g. typos).
    • Michael’s Remarks

Thanks to all the maintainers who attended the meeting!

2 Likes
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Thanks @Jorge_Nicho for the recap!

Glad to see that ROS 2.0 was on the agenda! I’m dropping a few notes / questions here but I’m happy to continue the discussion on a separate thread to not clutter this one.

Looking at MoveIt! recently, there seem to be a few changes required for ROS2 that are compatible with ROS1 and can be done on the current development branch:

  • moving to package format 2
  • migrate to tf2

Current features used by MoveIt! but not in ROS2 yet:

  • no actions yet (C++ or Python)
  • no parameters in Python yet
  • pluginlib: class_loader has been ported but not pluginlib yet, it’s not yet sure what plugins api will be like exactly

Specific ROS 2 changes:

  • no nodelets in ROS 2, all nodes are nodelets (there is almost no nodelets left in MoveIt! but the remaining one(s) will have to be converted to nodes)

Questions:

  • Could you clarify what is in the “ROS parameters not supported” bullet?
  • Could you also give more details about the “Communication layer” challenge?
  • “Using the bridge as an initial step. Have verification from OSRF” << We can discuss this in more details on the follow-up thread as well

(I know this is a summary and a good way to have more details would have been to attend the meeting :confused: )

Thanks!

/cc @dirk-thomas

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