The next Manipulation WG Meeting / MoveIt Maintainer Meeting will be November 19th at 8am PST. While normally this meeting is held on the fourth Thursday of the month, this month we moved it a week earlier to avoid conflicting with Thanksgiving, a major holiday in the US. For similar reasons the December meeting will also be held on the third Thursday.
Your time zone: 2020-10-19T15:00:00Z
Agenda:
Old business
ROSWorld retrospective
First-timer issues progress (as discussed last month) (Tyler)
MoveIt Tutorials currently require installing MoveIt from source. Can/should that change? (Mark)
What did people think of ROS World? Especially the MoveIt section?
Sad we couldn’t do live Q&A
Critique of lots of “talks” that were actually ads.
But, it was a free event
But, some of the ads were actually interesting/fun to watch
Fair number of new people are trying the MoveIt Discord channel, but there is a fragmentation of attention
First timer issues
Tyler: Issues that are easier to tackle, reserved for noobs
One is done already, a few more in progress
Dave: adding a big blue button for first time issues
Introduce new faces
Alex: a new PickNiker, taking charge of the MoveIt website
Abi: improving the tutorials
David Lu: the Nav Man, may be adding some nav features to MoveIt
MoveIt Roadmap
Website preview
Will include a table to propose new features, leads, and estimated date
Make a PR to have your feature added to the table
Christian: more detail on each feature?
Discourse will link to the Discord channel
Reviewing Felix’s Frames PR
Still needs an in-depth review
MoveIt tutorials
Instructions ask you to check out source
Long compile time
If the tutorials worked with Debians, that would be great
Could provide a source Docker image, to get a recent build (shot down, it’s not intuitive)
Most of the tutorials will work from binaries
There are also several branches with different instructions
Alex is working on making tutorial navigation easier. Especially for different ROS versions
robots.txt: hide older versions from Google search, e.g. Indigo and Jade
Nobody opposes making binaries the default
GSoC will be shorter next year
Half the number of hours available
Mark: not worth it
Tyler, Felix, Andy: worth it
Early onboarding will be important
Need to define tasks well and choose the students wisely
Can contact previous GSoC students again
Students can spread the work out more, may be able to attract students interested in a side gig
Look for candidates who already actively participate
Mark will apply again
Hybrid planner
Sebastian: Master’s student, PickNik intern
Has done a lit review, produced an architecture draft
MoveIt2 issue #300
Is looking for feedback at this early stage of development
This week, started first prototype
Goal is a working concept by the end of the year
Gave a diagram overview
Global planner (slower planning frequency)
Local planner (small adjustments, e.g. for force regulation)
Global planner node/component, local planner node/component, hybrid manager node/component
Andy: could implement the local planner as a modified version of the ros2_control JointTrajectoryController
The controller can blend new trajectories already
No plan to implement re-planning yet
Local planner: goal is 100-300 Hz
Global planner: 30 Hz goal
Felix: wants a concrete example to discuss
Marq: what is the target hardware? Most industrial robots have control loops of 40-60 Hz
UR E-series is up to 500 Hz, Panda up to 1 kHz
Marq: beginning a pick when the full size of the object is not known is another use case
UR driver for ROS2
PickNik, ROS-Industrial, UR, Spirit Aerosystems and FZI are collaborating on a UR driver for ROS2
ros2_control should be making their initial release soon (possibly one week or two)
That is the last missing piece to finish the driver
Hope to have an alpha release for testing in roughly 2 weeks
ABB & Kuka ROS2 demos are also in the works
by Dmitri Ignakov
In attendance:
Tyler Weaver, Michael Ferguson, Alex Goldman, Christian Henkel, Felix von Drigalski, Andy Zelenak, Jafar Abdi, Gijs van der Hoorn, Marq Rasmussen, Sebastian Jahr, Mark Moll, Henning Kaiser, Jere Liukkonen, Abi Sivaraman, David Lu