MoveIt Manipulation WG Meeting - Jan 27th

The next Manipulation WG Meeting / MoveIt Maintainer Meeting will be 2022-01-27T16:00:00Z

Agenda :

  • Old business
  • Development update, roadmap epics (Henning, Tyler)
  • MoveIt Community Meeting in Q1 2021 (Sean)
  • GSoC - Project ideas and mentors
    • Proposal (v4hn) - Use moveit_benchmark_suite for reporting performance changes in CI
  • <your topic>

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#

It would be great to have an update on timelines for Python support in Moveit2.

Maybe this could be a good GSoc project?

I’m sure GSoc will be a topic - please come with your thoughts around the program (I know there is already interest in Draft: Simultaneous execution of trajectories by cambel · Pull Request #2810 · ros-planning/moveit · GitHub). This summer there will be both half and full summer engagements.

A brief discussion of the Google Summer of Code 2022 would be good:

  • Project ideas
  • Potential mentors

Submissions for mentoring organizations are due in February 2022.

I will most likely not manage to attend today because of a parallel meeting, so I’ll wait for the minutes.

For GSoC, I would like to propose a full project to define and write scenarios for the moveit_benchmark_suite and provide an integration that will run a subset on pull-requests and report back in a github message, similar to how our codecov check does it.
I would hope for @CaptainYoshi’s support there.

27 January, 2022 Maintainer Meeting Notes

Agenda

  • Old business
  • Development update, roadmap epics (Henning, Tyler)
  • MoveIt Community Meeting in Q1 2022 (Sean)
  • GSoC - Project ideas and mentors
    • Proposal (v4hn) - Use moveit_benchmark_suite for reporting performance changes in CI

Notes

Updated MoveIt API documentation

Available at this link.

MoveIt Setup Assistant (David Lu!!)

  • ROS2 MSA port is still in-progress
  • Vatan is helping with this in this branch (mostly with bufixes, building from David’s WIP)
  • Working with Mark Moll to get the list of OMPL planners and the needed info about them. Want to create a dictionary of parameters for each planner implementation. Mark knows how to do this in Python, but less clear how to do this in C++.
  • David Lu!! is still working on porting existing MSA code so it can be dynamically loaded. Mostly GUI framework code.
  • There is still an open question about what is generated.
  • Henning: planning to assign different people to widgets/plugins – need to get list of WIP stuff from David.

Windows support (Lior):

  • Working on documentation of installation instructions. Binary version is easy, but source installation is harder. Lots of ongoing build errors on Windows. In particular there’s a problem with CHOMP. These issues are blocking a PR to add instructions to the documentation (prefer not to merge instructions that don’t work).

2022 MoveIt Community Meeting (Sean)

  • Announcement link
  • Registration is open for lightning talks and presentations.
  • Sean: Want to get the overall community involved, rather than just this maintainer’s group. Several options for how specifically this will be organized depending on level of community interest. Might be on Discord mostly like World MoveIt Day. Could also register for Swapcard.
  • Mark: There are some confirmed speakers already (Rice University, Intel). Particularly interested in getting perspectives from people who use MoveIt but aren’t necessarily on Github all the time. Would like to record this, with permission from presenters.
  • Henning: Lightning talks can be pre-recorded, though live Q&A is desirable.

Google Summer of Code (Mark)

  • Mark: recap: Google pays students to do open-source internships. Format is changing – last year was a part-time commitment, this year adds a full-time project. Organized through MoveIt. Need to have a list of projects we would like the students to work on. Need 2 mentors confirmed, and a few project proposals.
  • Simon: Would be interesting to fix Bullet collision checker integration (currently half-finished). There are some WIP PRs and bugs that need attention.
  • Andy: Had discussed focusing on smaller projects, since big projects are hard to get finished.
  • Mark: There’s a separate Google effort to support documentation (Summer of Docs).
  • Joe: Discourse thread had proposed Python support in MoveIt2 as a GSoC project. Sounds interesting!
    • Tyler: We might want to handle this differently than in MoveIt1.
    • Robert: Pybind is a good way to do this. Ends up as a slim layer to convert on the basis of ROS message types.
    • Henning: thinks this is too much work for a GSoC project (though there’s some debate about this).
    • Vatan: A majority of MoveIt users prefer Python (distinction between users and maintainers).
    • Mark: Current Python bindings only support a subset of MoveIt functionality.
  • Henning: Michael (v4hn) had also suggested benchmarking. Thinks it would be really useful to test for performance regressions in CI. CaptainYoshi did work on this as a past GSoC project. Need to find documentation about what was done previously.
  • Mark: Past lab project for motion planning benchmarking
  • Henning: We’ll continue talking about this asynchronously.
  • Mark: We need to have a public list of projects, so it makes sense to do this as a pull request. Discussion can happen there.

Attendees

Abishalini Sivaraman
Andy Zelenak
Cory Crean
David Lu!!
Henning Kayser
Jack Center
Jafar Abdi
Joe Schornak
Lior Lustgarten
Mark Moll
Marq Rasmussen
Nathan Brooks
Ranjit Kathiriya
Robert Haschke
Sean Kolk
Sencer Yazici
Simon Schmeisser