Attendees:
- Steve Macenski
- Josh Wallace
- Stephen Adhisaputra
- Ruffin White
- Alexey Merzlyakov
- Aarushi Mehta
- Awab Syed
- Ryan Friedman
- Rohit Singh
- Shyam Ganatra
Topics
Announcements:
- Open Navigation LLC’s launch!
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See blog post for more information: We're Go For Launch — Open Navigation LLC
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This is a great new journey and chapter in the ROS ecosystem
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Our mission is to develop, support, and maintain the Nav2 project and more broadly mobile robotics ecosystem in open-source ROS
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Looking for sponsors and partners to help us in this mission to make sure Nav2 / ROS can be sustainably maintained for the long-term to support the entire project lifecycle of our users
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Sponsor’s funding is used for upkeep, maintaince, community response, quality control, and development fully in open-source
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In exchange, get extended private access to navigation expertise, prioritization in communications / PR reviews to have their issues responded to first, and influence over the roadmap direction to make sure we’re balancing value producing activities to the sponsors and broader community
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We’re also available for consulting and contracting w.r.t. Nav2 / ROS / mobile robotics technologies
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If interested → please let me know! I’m looking still for 1-2 more for this year (sponsors@opennav.org)
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Dexory: https://www.dexory.com
- Platinum
- Makers of a warehouse inventory management system using Nav2 to power their robotic data-collection platform.
- Super cool robot, can take measurements up to 12 meters tall via an expandable boom and uses much of the latest-and-greatest in the Nav2 stack to enable it
- Their product is selling the data collected and derived insights to help power better business decisions and warehouse operations state.
- Have been great partners to Nav2 for a long time and really happy to be working with them more closely
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Polymath Robotics: https://www.polymathrobotics.com/
- Silver
- Makers of safety-critical navigation systems for massive industrial vehicles like tractors, mining equipment, etc using Nav2 to power the core technology.
- They provide simple to use APIs for non-robotics experts to automate traditional machinery, rapidly. Super cool to see all the applications Nav2 is helping them power!
- They work on some really cool outdoor ackermann vehicles so its great to have a diversity of applications to help improve Nav2 for us all and the generalization of this stack
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Stereolabs: https://www.stereolabs.com
- Silver
- Makers of the ZED cameras, powered by the Nvidia Jetson boards and comes with a spatial AI SDK to do detection, VIO, VSLAM, tracking and more
- Recently released a new set of cameras, ZED X, specifically for mobile robotics applications that I’m excited to get my hands on and test
- ZED X - AI Stereo Camera for Robotics | Stereolabs
- Low min-Z, great depth quality, integrated IMU, small, hardware synchronized with industrialized connectors, etc. Super solid option now with a camera designed for mobile robotics!
- Excited to see how Nav2 users can leverage their expertise, sensors, and SDKs to speed up robotics applications and fix long-standing problems with VIO/VSLAM. I think this could be a game changer for some!
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Confidential
- Silver
- I can’t say much, but for transparancy I made part of the sponsorship that any explicit requests made had to be attributed to them, even namelessly
- But, they’ve pretty much laid out that the roadmap I have for the foreseeable future is in their own best interest so they have requested nothing in particular beyond “keep doing what you’re doing”
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New additions of note:
- Adding composition node support for Collision Monitor and Costmap Filter Server (Alexey Merzlyakov, Filipe Cerveira)
- MPPI fix for trivially short paths in the path following critic (Guillaume Doisy)
- Fixing incorrect and potential infinite looping problem using Theta* in SLAM sessions while resizing the node pool (Steve Macenski)
- Releasing Iron binaries, testing, and updating the README with the build statuses on Iron (Steve Macenski)
- Adding Collision Monitor Limit-polygon type to limit max velocities (Brice Renaudeau)
- Fixing CI jobs to be green from testing failures in the Smoother Server, Costmap2D, and Behavior Tree Nodes (Steve Macenski)
New bugs of note
- Smac Planners when the costmap is misconfigured to not have the inflation radius at least the robot’s largest cross-section (non-circular only) can fail to collision check properly in non-lethal cases. A check needs to be added to the Smac Planners to evaluate that the largest-cross-section cost is non-zero to use collision checking optimizations. If not, throw warning to inform users or revert to non-optimized collision checking.