After a successful meeting in September, we welcome everyone to the October meeting.
As mentioned last month, we’ll hear about Bristlemouth, the open hardware communication protocol and underwater connector, from Zack Johnson (Sofar Ocean) and Charles Cross (Mission Robotics). Bristlemouth is seeking to be the standard hardware interface for marine applications. You may have heard about its event at OCEANS 2023 Gulf Coast. Pilot test kits are available.
I believe this talk may be of interest outside of the marine community, if you want to hear about a deep dive in middleware and communication protocol. People behind Bristlemouth have looked into the area extensively before deciding on a protocol that’s compatible with ROS but general purpose to support other middleware. Bring your questions for Charles.
Feel free to add your community updates to the agenda.
Thank you everyone for attending. The room was quite different from last month, so we did another round of intros. See agenda attendees list and recording to check out what the community has been up to.
We didn’t have time to go over the kanban board, though last time some people were interested. If you’re looking to give back to the community, do head to the Matrix chat, voice your interest, see who else is interested, and use the WG as a sounding board. We don’t have formal technical efforts ongoing currently, but the WG is as much as the people (that’s you!) make it. If you have initiatives and ideas for the community, we can help support each other’s work. If you have ideas for future speakers or activities, post on Matrix as well.
Thank you so much Zack and Charles for the overview and deep dive into Bristlemouth networking! We loved hearing about the middleware options that you looked into, and insight into decisions you made for marine embedded applications. Great to see support for ROS 2 and inspirations from Zenoh and other protocols. Looking forward to ROS 2 integration and message standardization.
Any questions or feedback about Bristlemouth, they welcome community interactions on the Bristlemouth Discourse forum: https://bristlemouth.discourse.group/
Oh, we do have something technical we need help with. How can I forget.
DAVE is looking for active maintainers and people to respond to tickets. This is a repo with 170 stars and the apparent successor to UUV_Simulator. There are active users, some pull requests that need merging, and some issues that need responding to. To do this, you’ll need a setup with ROS 1 Noetic and Gazebo-classic 11, preferably in Docker (we have a Dockerfile).
This need not be a long-term commitment, we just need tickets responded to and PRs merged as soon as we can, because some things are broken and the PRs fix them. None of the past maintainers (including myself) have time to test them. If we have a couple people to review and test PRs, then it is more mergeable than if zero people reviewed it.
This is an opportunity to learn about open source maintenance and interact with the community.
Please let me know if you can help, here or on Matrix.
