MoveIt Manipulation WG Meeting - April 28th

MoveIt
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The next Manipulation WG Meeting / MoveIt Maintainer Meeting will be 2022-04-28T15:00:00Z.

Agenda

  • Old Business
  • MoveIt 2 Development update
  • GSoC Proposals (Mark)
  • WMD 2022 - May 26th (Henning)

Please request any agenda topics you would like included.

Meeting

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Phone Numbers (US)

+1 347-486-5750

PIN: 644 991 049#

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Proposed agenda item: a brief discussion of the development strategy for MoveIt2 on ROS 2 Humble and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

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28 April, 2022 MoveIt Maintainer Meeting

Agenda

MoveIt development update
MSA
Discussion about deleting some functionality (contentious!)
GSOC
World MoveIt Day
MoveIt2 on Humble

Old business:

Notes

MoveIt Development Update (Andy)

  • Blocked by moveit_config_utils package.
    • Jafar: This is probably a dependency issue, will investigate some more
  • Jafar will also take a look at the issue Robert pointed out.

MoveIt Setup Assistant (David)

  • Latest change to moveit_launch_utils let updated MSA come into main.

    • Not at full feature parity yet, can’t generate everything needed for the full demo.
    • Important missing pieces: perception config, generate and edit joint limits, controllers and simulation.

  • Shouldn’t rely on MSA as the sole tool needed to get robot up and running.
    David asking for help from a subject matter expert about integrating with ros2_control.

  • Tyler made an example of a robot driver package that implements ros2_control, which people who are developing robot drivers are finding really useful.

    • Mark: Good example of facilitating development-by-analogy.

    • Michael: We should figure out what our actual best-practice for this is, vs. letting it be defined by default.

    • Andy: ros2_control_demos package would be another good place for this category of resources.

Google Summer Of Code (Mark)

  • Deadline passed for students to submit proposals. Looks like we’ll be able to fill our slots.

  • Project mentors need to review applications and find good fits.

  • Since we required that applicants have submitted a PR prior to applying, there are some PRs that partially implement the described projects (updating tutorials, for example).

  • We’ll request 2 or 3 slots and hopefully get 2 or 3 participants.

World MoveIt Day (Henning)

  • Tentatively planned for May 26th – imminent!

  • Henning was waiting for feedback in case anyone has conflicts.

    • Mark: it coincides with ICRA

    • Michael: it conflicts with a holiday

    • Henning: could move to a week later – June 2nd

  • Mark: we need to do a better job of publicizing this than we did for the MoveIt community day

  • Date has been moved to June 2nd.

  • Cassidy: Went to a Hello Robot community meeting recently. It was a nice event, and we could use it as inspiration for how we structure our events.

Deleting Code (Michael)

  • Michael’s perspective:

    • Even if code is currently broken, that doesn’t mean that we should delete it. It serves as a useful example of functionality that someone had thought about previously.

    • If we remove functionality, then we need to provide a path for how others can reimplement it or replace it with something else.

    • Two big issues where this came up: deleting all non-TOTG time parameterization, and planning with sensing.

    • TOTG does have some issues at runtime, and some cases where it works worse than the other approaches.

    • Plan-with-sensing implements replanning if the original trajectory and goal poses are invalidated. Integrates with orienting sensors to collect more info about environment. Originally created with the PR2 in mind.

  • Nathan: The code in question does introduce a maintenance burden. Need to update all plugins to add new features.

  • Michael: We could make changes to the API to reduce the amount of work needed here and improve compatibility across plugins.

  • Henning: We should not remove functioning code.

  • Mark: Brittle code could live on as a separate demo.

    • Michael: Not always possible, given how deeply some of this is integrated with the MoveGroup node.

  • Michael: Let’s talk about this more in the appropriate issue/PR topics.

  • Mark: In general, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution

MoveIt2 Humble Development Strategy Question (Joe)

  • Henning: Humble will be supported on the main branch. We’ll support Humble until the next LTS release. There will be a stable Humble branch that does not include breaking API changes.

  • Tyler: One problem with targeting Rolling on the main branch is that when I-ROS comes out (next intermediate release), we probably can’t maintain compatibility with Humble.

  • Nathan: We’ll backport bugfixes with mergify.

  • Henning: Our exact strategy here is still an ongoing topic of discussion

  • Nathan: We’re also talking about maintaining a Rolling snapshot repo to mitigate the impact of regressions in the upstream Rolling release.

  • Tyler: As soon as we have a Humble release, there will be a Humble branch. The motivation for this is mostly supporting the release process.

  • Michael: Open question: will we start #ifdef-ing code to support diverging APIs?

Attendees

Abishalini Sivaraman
Andy Zelenak
Cassidy Elliott
Chris Thrasher
Cory Crean
David Lu!!
Davide Falconti
Henning Kayser
Jack Center
Jafar Abdi
Joe Schornak
Mark Moll
Marq Rasmussen
Michael Gorner (v4hn)
Nathan Brooks
Sebastian Jahr
Sencer Yazici
Tyler Weaver