Manipulation WG / MoveIt Maintainer Meeting - Mar 23rd

MoveIt
1

The next Manipulation WG Meeting / MoveIt Maintainer Meeting will be 2023-03-23T15:00:00Z.

Agenda

Meeting

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Phone Numbers (US)

+1 347-486-5750

PIN: 644 991 049#

2

Attendance:

  • David Lu!!
  • Paul Gesel
  • Sebastian Castro
  • Henning Kayser
  • Andy Zelenak
  • Marq Rasmussen
  • Chance Cardona
  • Ashton Larkin
  • Tyler Weaver
  • Sebastian Jahr

Notes

  • Issues with MoveIt 2 / ROS 2:
    • [sjahr] Switch all ros2 branches from Humble to Rolling, to be consistent with other repos?
      • [marq] Concerns about ros2 branch not actually working in all distros.
      • [andyz] +1 on a rolling branch, since humble and rolling are no longer compatible in MoveIt2
    • [henning] Tutorial versioning with MoveItPy : Building API docs is linked to the distro, multiversion doesn’t work with multiple distros. Need to switch how tutorial versioning is done, but will take significant effort.
      • Key developers are not present, so will continue this offline.
    • [henning] Use of moveit2_resources in the main repo introduces a circular dependency chain since it’s a separate repo and we depend on it for tests.
      • One idea: Add an example “flagship” package to the main repo, ideally vendor agnostic. For example, Paul Gesel’s ROS 2 control demo bot?
        Create custom robot config for testing to eliminate circular dependency on moveit_resources · Issue #1924 · ros-planning/moveit2 · GitHub
      • [marq] Concerns about not testing vendor packages. But then we need to make sure that CI can also test other vendors’ packages. +1 [scastro, andyz]
      • [henning] If we go down our own robot route, we should have reasonable coverage of robot types (e.g. 6DOF vs 7DOF, moving base, mimic joints, etc.)
      • [andyz] Is this more important vs. other priorities, such as the GSoC projects? Seems like it would be a significant undertaking.
      • [scastro] Having our own robot model could open up the doors for us to have more tutorial content about actually setting up a MoveIt config from scratch.
      • Converging to:
        • Our custom robot should be used for TESTS, not for EXAMPLES
        • Need to unify what robot our tests use – right now, certain packages test with certain robots and it’s all “coincidental”
        • Still allow running tests for other vendor packages, just don’t require them. You can choose to run all MoveIt tests (not some) with alternative hardware.
        • Probably still want to use a UR and/or Panda in regular testing / examples
      • [tyler] Start with something simple: Can we put our Panda config in moveit2 repo?
        • There might be concerns about the licensing of those configs, but seems permissive enough – both for Panda and UR.
        • Doesn’t have to be part of the moveit metapackage, so when users apt install they don’t get the robot specific resources configs
      • [sjahr] Panda doesn’t even support ROS 2 – maybe worth switching to one that does, at least.
      • [tyler] Making our tests accept a configurable robot requires also parameterizing a lot of the unit tests.
        • [sjahr] Could also specify which tests can be run by which robots
        • [tyler] Should not take this on all at once! Should find ways to do it incrementally.
  • [henning] World MoveIt Day 2023
    • Doing a Python themed day
    • Goal: Inviting a broader community from e.g., the ML community, and also to stress-test the new bindings!
    • Targeting 2nd week of June (Thursday, June 8th)
    • Will prepare Docker images to help users get started
    • Also want to prepare a challenge / hackathon
      • If anyone wants to volunteer for planning / standing up this challenge, let me know
      • Showcase final demos from the best teams – would be nice to do it on hardware, but that may not be practical. Maybe simulation?
  • [henning] GSoC applications are now open : Mar 20 - Apr 4
    • If you know people, encourage them to apply
  • [andyz] When will Rolling CI be running again? Blocked on merging PRs