The minutes of the meeting:
Participants: Ayush Garg, Dave Coleman, Mark Moll, Gijs van der Hoorn, Yu Yan (probably), Jafar Abdi, Henning Kayser, Robert Haschke, Rob Coleman, Jorge Nicho, Mike Lautman and Felix von Drigalski (writing the minutes)
Joined later: Marq Rasmussen, Simon Schmeisser, Yatharta Tuladhar (left early)
Updates:
Mark Moll is reviewing the additions from Jens Petit GSoC project and Omid Heidari’s Picknik internship. Comments:
- Bullet PR is hard to review, because there are a lot of changes. Should be good to merge though, considering the amount of review and mentoring that went into it.
- Trajopt is tricky because of licensing. The default solver library from the 90s does not have a license and the author has disappeared. The question is if we a) merge it now and deal with the license issues later or b) keep it as an external repository, for example. IPOPT is an alternative has an Eclipse license and should be good. GUROBI (?) is free for academic use and widely used.
Dave notes that it would be bad to include unlicensed code in the repository.
(Also see addendum about this below)
MoveIt Task Constructor:
Henning has been working on it, but we still need a demo. Dave asks if Robert could finish it on the weekend maybe, since it’s a company quarterly goal.
Robert: The demo is not specific to the MTC, and making it might be a bit more involved, which is why I’ve been putting it off, so.
Other updates:
Mark brought up the code of conduct. There’s an open PR, which is not about enforcing new rules or correcting anything going wrong in the community, but about signalling to the outside that we care. This is also in response to the events around Linus Torvalds etc. It is hard to imagine this happening in the MoveIt community, but it is prudent.
Dave, Felix are in agreement.
Gijs bring up concerns about people having left open-source communities over this, and because it sounds like it requires maintainers to police and enforce the code of conduct.
Robert understands your concerns and agrees that we don’t really need a code of conduct, since we never had issues, but doesn’t care if we have it.
Mike: Good to define standards, can’t imagine anyone being in danger of being kicked out.
Dave: It might welcome minorities.
The discussion is left to sync up in the Github PR.
MoveIt Workshop:
We will have a workshop on the day after ROSCon, a mini conference aimed at developers. We will discuss the roadmap and direction for MoveIt, grasping efforts, new features. Participants will be expected to be familiar with MoveIt if they want to get the most out of it.
Adding MoveIt maintainers:
Mark Moll is accepted as a maintainer. Some discussions about the level of commitment, experience and maturity expected of maintainers.
Mike suggests that we should move the MoveIt tutorials to moveit.ros.org to look more professional. Robert questions if open-source code should be hosted on a private company server like that, and claiming them as part of Picknik might seem a bit like cheating. Dave adds that it’s not uncommon and Picknik supported the creation of the tutorials (including the push with Franka Emika).
Gijs brings up that the license of the text is an issue, as BSD might not apply to text. We agree that this situation needs to be investigated.
Addendum from Levi on the mailing list, re. the TrajOpt solver license:
In reference to the TrajOpt license issues. The source code can be found using the link below, It states that it can only be used for non-commercial use. We have been using OSQP in-place of BPMPD because of this issue. We did a complete performance evaluation of the currently supported solvers (BPMPD, OSQP, QPOASIS and GUROBI). They all had their pros and cons, but OSQP was the next best with a desirable license. We plan to make this the default solver for TrajOpt. Hope this is helpful.
http://plato.asu.edu/sub/nlores.html