MoveIt Meeting Notes:
Michael Gorner is back!
- He has a 2 month old son! Congrats!
World MoveIt Day Locations:
- Discussed MoveIt Day Locations:
- Tokyo - Felix
- Boulder - PickNik
- Boston - Ian McMahon and Bryce
- San Antonio - Jorge Nicho and SWRI
- Germany - Michael Gorner expressed interest, but would likely just be his lab.
- San Fransico - Dave will work on it (+ Jon Binney)
- We’ve got a how to do World MoveIt Day (Note: don’t know where this document is, but Logistics under https://moveit.ros.org/events/world-moveit-day-2018/ is probably similar)
GSOC Project Progress
- Jens:
- Things are progressing, continuous collision checking via casting works. A PR is still in development, but will be open to the public soon (a few weeks)
- Omid:
- Has been working on another project, but will progress with TrajOpt next week.
MoveIt Example Apps
- Led by Intel China (Yu Yun in the rep on this call):
- MoveIt Example Apps repo exists (https://github.com/ros-planning/moveit_example_apps)
- Handling dependencies for the CI will be difficult, timeouts are common
- Each application can have it’s own docker image with prebuilt dependencies
- Also open to other ideas, other contributions as well
- Will there be examples with real hardware?
- Each application will gurantee working in simulation
- Make some nodes in the application tutorial
- Will make an initial PR soon
Making a Kinetic/Melodic Release (Robert Haschke)
- Lots of commits on master, Robert has back ported some changes back to Melodic
- However, no one is really using Melodic, so we can’t confirm that it’s still operational and stable.
- But we still need to release so we can stop older bugs being brought up on the issue tracker.
- Robert will prepare a release, and has already cherry-picked bug fixes back to Melodic
- We’ll also need a list of other commits that could go back
- PickNik has been considering taking on more often releases from Master, likely a PPA on top of ROS. It wouldn’t need it to include the rest of ROS, and should have a different debian package name.
Benchmarking work: Henning Kayser
- Adding planning pipeline support for the benchmark packages, simplified without warehouse, simple similarity measure for traj on the same experiment (how repeatable it is).
- Contains all the different runs, can load different log files.
- Could extend the similarity metric to handle different scenes as well, even though it could completely change the final results
- A current WIP PR is out now, but reviewable PRs are coming next week.
The MoveIt 2.0 Roadmap/Future Plans
- https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lyLJBkPqtwdDkBAJqNf5oTO0D1cjGrO6SVM-R0yf9cY/edit?usp=sharing
- Are the state machines in MoveIt in the right place?
- We don’t want to write our own state machines
- Why behavior trees vs state machines?
- trees give you a higher level idea of what is happening
- State machines are more event based, although trees can be as well
- Behavior trees don’t allow simultaneous actions
- What do we get by adding state machines?
- allows more complicated visualizers, but also just models logic better than manually include a bunch of if statements.
- Action hooks that send out events might become an interface, other libraries could hook into those with their own state machines.
- Fully Leverage ROS2
- Components nodes = 0 copying messages, etc.
- There are a lot of work and refactoring to be done to switch: is it worth the effort?
- the interface still must be ROS msgs, no copying be possible serializing.
- In general, C++ interfaces are easier to use, although ROS IDL might be easier to understand
- In terms of Grant funding, ROS 2 is desired, so it’s one of the reason’s we’re looking into it
- Determinism and Improved Interfaces are the more aligned with what most contributors to MoveIt do.
- We should consider what our target users are (a few examples use cases), and what our design philosphy is
- Look for a discourse post soon
Misc
- Sean Yen from Microsoft, have been working with ROS for a while now.
- They’ve made a Windows version of MoveIt, more coming in July.
- They have a CI set up already, should be as easy as retargeting the repository.
- We have Microsoft’s support for helping resolve Window’s specific issues, there will be conversations soon about if those issues should hold up PRs
