Maintainer Meeting Recap - March 20th

MoveIt
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Topics:

  • Branching for ROS Melodic
  • New website and tutorials effort
  • Task planner
  • Cartesian path planning in MoveIt!
  • Moving to Discourse
  • C++11 auto et. al. in MoveIt
  • Future of indigo-devel
  • Python interface changes
  • ROS 2.0 (as always)
  • GSoC

Attendees:

  • Michael ‘v4hn’ Görner
  • Robert Haschke
  • Isaac IY Saito
  • Jorge Nicho
  • Dave Coleman
  • Ian McMahon
  • Bence Magyar
  • Jonathan Binney
  • Gijs Vanderhoorn
  • Mike Lautman
  • Andy McEvoy

Summary:

Branching for ROS Melodic - see issue

  • Dave will fork for branches and setup CI
  • Jorge will run plugin migration scripts
  • Ian will work on tf2 migration
  • Python2 will be EOL mid-life of Melodic

New website and tutorials effort - feedback:

  • Currently its a loose collection of individual points (needs a storyline)
  • Consistency
  • Planning for more advanced use cases (more complicated scenarios)
  • Additional sensors (kinetic)
  • Needs move_group interface API summary

MoveIt! Task Planner

  • Heavy development, about to change API again
  • Execution module still missing

Cartesian path planning in MoveIt!

  • Break messages sooner for new functionality
  • Discussed different planning methods - we need a plugin interface

Moving to Discourse

  • everyone is +1
  • Rename current MoveIt! Developers Discourse topic to MoveIt! users

C++11 auto et. al. in MoveIt

  • Gorner will update style guidelines for “auto” usage
  • Namespace brackets can be around whole file instead of for each function

Future of indigo-devel

  • Lots of PRs not backported into indigo at the moment
  • Its a lot of effort to backport everything
  • One more indigo release then stop making changes
  • PR2 is almost ready for Kinetic, lots of progress made

Python interface changes

  • Most of functionality doesn’t really work in python
  • Python interface diverging from C++ interface
  • Bence will try to keep slowly adding tests
  • moveit_python (Ferguson), does not wrap C++ but is native

ROS 2.0

  • PickNik trying to find sponsors for this effort
  • We will do some of the initial migration in ROS Melodic (tf, python)

GSoC

  • Several students are currently applying via OSRF and JSK

WMD Potential Dates

  • ROSCon: Sept 29-30th
  • IROS: Oct 1
  • WMD: Oct 23 or 24 or 25?
  • NIPS: Dec 3
2 Likes
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As some of you know, I’ve been working on compliant manipulations that require real-time Cartesian motions, so I made a Cartesian jogger package. Currently I do Cartesian motions programmatically (vs. teleoperated) by sending ROS msgs (as if coming from a joystick) but I’m definitely interested in getting this integrated with MoveIt. I don’t think it will be tooo difficult either. Advice on where to start?

compliant manipulation video

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Hi Andy - the video looks great and the package idea sounds very much needed. I think this discussion belongs either on a different Discourse topic within MoveIt!, or on Github - your choice. We can discuss further there :slight_smile: