Manipulation WG / MoveIt Maintainer Meeting - March 28

MoveIt
1

The next Manipulation WG Meeting / MoveIt Maintainer Meeting will be 2024-03-28T15:00:00Z.

Agenda

  • Replacing Octomap with OpenVDB variant (Robert @ FZI)
  • MTC ROS 2 branch and development strategy (sjahr, henningkayser)
  • Mobile Manipulation Support (henningkayser)
  • Lack of reviewers and maintainers

Meeting

https://meet.google.com/fpo-srqg-feg

Dial in by Phone (US)
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2

Attendance:

  • Henning Kayser (PickNik)
  • Sebastian Jahr (PickNik)
  • Chance Cardona (PickNik)
  • Abishalini Sivaraman (PickNik)
  • Robert Wilbrandt (FZI)
  • David Yackzan (PickNik)
  • Nathan Brooks (PickNik)

Agenda:

  • Replacing Octomap with OpenVDB variant
    • Octomap is not performant enough to get a sufficient update rate when using multiple cameras
    • FZI has good experiences with OpenVDB and evaluates at the moment how this could be incorporated into moveit2
    • Some initial work has already started but nothing ready to show
  • MTC ROS 2 branch and development strategy
    • ros2 branch was force pushed during a “clean-up” effort, ignoring maintainer policy
    • some of the changes in the original branch were left out in this branch
    • Open issue to have exclusive write access by MTC authors (ros2 branch was cleaned up and force-pushed · Issue #540 · ros-planning/moveit_task_constructor · GitHub)
    • concerns about requiring two PR approvals by maintainers from separate organizations
      • unrealistic, because there are not many different organizations
      • many PRs have been ignored in the past by the MTC authors
    • Possible next steps
      • Enforce community rules to prevent force pushing to development branches
      • Suggest moving MTC repo into other org if exclusive ownership is really wanted by the MTC authors
      • move ros2 part of MTC into fork or alternative repository moveit2_task_constructor
      • migrate MTC ros2 into moveit2 repository
    • Conclusion: Due to scheduling conflicts, not everybody involved could make it to this meeting. We’ll schedule a separate meeting to discuss this with everybody involved.
  • Mobile Manipulation Support
    • Henning and Abi are actively working on multi DoF joint support in MoveIt2
    • Furthermore, they have been working on a diff-drive controller. Unfortunately, due to the current proof-of-concept implementation it depends right now on MoveIt so it is likely to make it not upstream to ros2_controllers
      • Where should ros2_controllers live that depend on MoveIt 2? Should we have a moveit2 controllers package?
      • There are multiple advantages to have a ros2_controllers package with moveit2 dependency
        • Mobile manipulation
        • Online planner/ controllers that need to do IK or collision checking with plugins implemented in moveit
        • Online planning approaches might benefit from ros2_control’s HW management capabilities
  • Lack of Reviewers
    • More integration test coverage and thus reducing maintenance cost
    • ros2_control had a review lottery what was their experience with that
    • How can we encourage people that aren’t maintainers to review more?
    • Action items
      • Enable CodeOwners
      • Possibly extend reviewer permissions to wider group