Manipulation WG / MoveIt Maintainer Meeting - April 27

[Henning_Kayser]

The next Manipulation WG Meeting / MoveIt Maintainer Meeting will be 2023-04-27T15:00:00Z.

Agenda

• Dev
  • Multi-pipeline planner in MTC (Sebastian Jahr, Marq)
    • Enable parallel planning with PipelinePlanner by sjahr · Pull Request #450 · ros-planning/moveit_task_constructor · GitHub
  • Specify controller interfaces with MoveGroup (Sebastian Castro)
    • Allow specifying controllers when executing a plan via move group · Issue #1632 · ros-planning/moveit2 · GitHub,
• Org
  • Community policy for generated (AI-assisted) content
  • GSoC Proposals 2023
  • World MoveIt Day 2023

Meeting

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Phone Numbers (US)

+1 347-486-5750

PIN: 644 991 049#

[Henning_Kayser]

Attendance:

• Paul Gesel
• Henning Kayser
• Chance Cardona
• Tyler Weaver
• Sebastian Jahr
• Esteban Guerrero
• Simon
• Joe Schornak
• Cassidy Elliott
• Abi Sivaraman

Enable parallel planning with PipelinePlanner in MTC (Sebastian Jahr)

• MTC PR: https://github.com/ros-planning/moveit_task_constructor/pull/450
• Alternative approach - WIP: Alternatives and fallback planners by sjahr · Pull Request #451 · ros-planning/moveit_task_constructor · GitHub
• Should we have parallel planning only in MoveIt? (can’t use cartesian interpolator currently)
• We don’t want to have code and feature redundancy, so can’t we just enable parallel planning in MTC level?
• Joe: Add MTC as part of MoveIt? - Possibly not really an option right now, but should be discussed in the future
• Henning: How about moving MTC’s solver interface into MoveIt only. We are lacking a consistent interface anyway (example: Cartesian Interpolator) and the solver is not really specific to MTC at all. The only concern is supporting MTC’s planner properties which should be solvable.

Extending MoveGroupInterface to specify controllers (Henning)

• Motivated by Sebastian Castro: Allow specifying controllers when executing a plan via move group · Issue #1632 · ros-planning/moveit2 · GitHub
• Feature is already available in MTC and MoveItCPP

AI-assisted PR’s in MoveIt (Henning)

• Have seen plenty of AI-assisted contributions lately, mostly low quality and broken
• Some contributor’s accounts have already been deleted on GitHub
• Discussion: Do we need to extend our Community Guidelines or Contribution Policy?
  • Require to mention AI-assisted content in PRs
  • Labeling suspicious contributions, and make it easier to reject or block users in case of spamming
• Some users may be motivated to somehow game their way into the GSoC program, so hopefully this is only a temporary problem
• Another concern is that AI-generated content may have copyright implications
• This has been discussed in the TSC meetings as well, so maybe there will be a ROS-wide solution in the future
• Conclusion: Raise awareness - MoveIt maintainers should keep an eye on this and discuss if we need to take action in follow-up meetings

GSoC 2023 (Henning)

• proposal ranking deadline is today (Apr 27)
• 19 proposals
• Two candidates ranked, primary mentors: Sebastian Castro and Andy Zelenak
• Received plenty of very low-effort or unqualified proposals. We should try to engage candidates even more for online contributions, and make sure they follow Google’s proposal guide.

World MoveIt Day 2023 (Henning)

• Date: June 8th
• Main Theme: Python support
• Competition with prize (PickNik is seeking sponsoring from hardware vendors)
• Intention: open MoveIt up to Python and Machine Learning community
• Brief Discussions:
  • Reach out to university labs directly and also advertise for GSoC 2024
  • Promote locally through Meetup