The meeting minutes for the regular meeting of the Technical Governance Committee held on the 27th of February, 2025, were approved in the March meeting and are now available in the official minutes repository. You can find the complete minutes here, as well as a Markdown version below. The Markdown version is experimental so please excuse any formatting problems and errors; the PDF version is the official version.
The next TGC meeting will take place in April, 2025. The minutes of the March meeting should be approved in that meeting and posted publicly shortly thereafter.
TECHNICAL GOVERNANCE COMMITTEE
MEETING MINUTES
27 FEB 2025 / 14:00-15:30 UTC / VIRTUAL VIA ZOOM
ATTENDEES
OSRF:
- Kat Scott (Developer Advocate)
- Vanessa Yamzon Orsi (Secretary)
- Vicky Brasseur (OSRA Governance Advisor)
OSRA Delegates/TGC Reps:
- Bence Magyar (ros-controls PMC Lead)
- Carlos Aguero, (Gazebo Lead Proxy)
- Clara Berendesen (Infra PMC Representative)
- Christian Henkel (Gold Rep, Bosch)
- Daniel Gordon (Gold Rep, Huawei)
- David Lu!! (Individual Rep)
- Hemal Shah (Platinum Rep, NVIDIA)
- Maria Vergo (Silver Rep, ROS-I)
- Michael Carroll (ROS PMC Interim Lead)
- Michael Grey (Open-RMF)
- Michel Hidalgo (Silver Rep, Ekumen)
- Steve Peters (Gazebo)
- Steven! Ragnarok (Infrastructure PMC Lead)
- Tully Foote (Platinum Rep, Intrinsic)
- Zhaoyuan Cheng (Platinum Rep, Qualcomm)
OSRA Observers
- Carmelo Di Franco (Aitronik)
- Henning Kayser (PickNik)
- Nick Hehr (Viam)
- Tom Panzarella (Seegrid)
- Todd Sutton (Zachry)
AGENDA
Vanessa Yamzon Orsi, TGC Secretary (filling in for the TGC Chair) called the meeting to order at 15:04 on 27 Feb 2025 UTC
Existing Business
- Confirmation of minutes of meeting TGC-20250123-Regular
- Approved by consensus
- Project reports
- Project update: ROS
- Presented by Michael Carroll, PMC Lead
- Transition work in progress as Michael took over as interim project lead from Chris Lalancette.
- Main priority is wrapping up RMW Zenoh as a Tier 1 middleware. Final steps on security implementation, CI and build farm are in progress. Aiming for completion before feature freeze on April 7 for the Kilted release.
- pixi and Conda migration - for Kilted and Rolling going forward, pixi will be the recommended installation procedure for ROS on Windows. We are seeing community excitement around this, and we are happy to report that the process is much better and we are getting support from the folks at prefix.dev who develop pixi.
- eProsima is wrapping up the renaming of Fast-RTPS to FastDDS in preparation of landing a new version of FastDDS in Kilted.
- Tomoya and Sony are working on action introspection to record ROSbag actions and replay them, a valuable feature for users with action-heavy workflows like Nav2.
- The Client Library Working Group has a couple of contributions such as a multi-threaded executor starvation fix and an rclpy events executor which improves python performance by an order of magnitude.
- Kilted timeline reminder: Feature freeze on April 7 with events in between including testing and tutorial party before final release on May 23, 2025.
- Presented by Michael Carroll, PMC Lead
- Project update: Gazebo
- Presented by Steve Peters, PMC Member on behalf of the PMC Lead
- Carlos Aguero (Honu) will serve as interim PMC lead while Addisu Taddese (Intrinsic) is out on personal leave.
- External contributions: generating 3D meshes from a smartphone and then making a Gazebo world from that, features from Gazebo Classic that were ported by community members such as visualizing frustums for cameras and also using the physics engine to calculate ray intersection.
- Recent features announced at community meeting: updated automatic inertial calculation feature to auto calculate density from specifying the mass of a link.
- Conda for Windows support: Gazebo’s Windows and CI machines have been switched to use Conda and pixi instead of vcpg.
- Roadmap item: continuing prototyping work on using Xeno with Gz transport.
- Several GSoC projects have been proposed: Migrating from QT 5 to 6, deprecating the Gz launch package which is mostly redundant with ROS 2 launch.
- The PMC has nominated Saurabh Kamat (github.com/sauk2) as a project committer; he is a great contributor and is now in the mentorship phase under Carlos Aguero.
- Presented by Steve Peters, PMC Member on behalf of the PMC Lead
- Project update: Open-RMF
- Presented by Michael Grey, PMC Lead
- One of the large ongoing efforts is the development of a workflow execution framework, particularly targeting workflow diagrams that can represent multi-agent interactions. The execution framework is finished, now working a serialized format to represent the workflow.
- Close to having support for buffer elements - elements within the workflow that can store data in flight or which needs to be retained during the lifespan of the workflow.
- Quality of life improvements to the site editor UI around the scenarios concept, currently an experimental feature.
- Moved on async capabilities for rclrs
- Discussion on rcls as the library of choice for Open-RMF implementation.
- The PMC initiated a biweekly Open-RMF community forum. This is an open-format, no agenda meeting. Community members may ask questions and the PMC representatives will answer.
- Presented by Michael Grey, PMC Lead
- Project update: Infrastructure
- Presented by Steven! Ragnarok, PMC Lead
- Primary mission right now is to transition all of our infrastructure hosts from Ubuntu 20.04 to 24.04 before the end of community support for 20.04. Contingency plans in place for support in the case we don’t make the cutoff. The priority is to move the ROS 2 buildfarm by mid-March to prepare for the work on ROS 2 Kilted (Kaiju).
- We had the first release of ROS build farm python modules in some time. Both the Infra team and community have been instructed to use them directly from the main development branch, but this was done so that other released packages can depend on it.
- All other resources focused on maintenance.
- Presented by Steven! Ragnarok, PMC Lead
- Project update: ROS Controls
- Presented by Bence Magyar, PMC Lead
- The PMC has been running a fortnightly meeting with leads and contributors.
- Working with companies upstreaming specialized or rugged versions of controllers such as the scaled joint trajectory controller that Universal Robot worked on.
- Working on adding the joint functionality at the framework and not the controller level.
- Recurring discussions are in place over introducing a real time-friendly high frequency logging or introspection tool to support running in the kHz range. Opted to adopt path statistics.
- Several depreciations are marked for removal for the ROS 2 L-release.
- Call for contribution to the PR regarding the joint limiting topic currently on Discourse.
- Presented by Bence Magyar, PMC Lead
- Project update: ROS
- Existing Business
-
Status of SIGs/TCs
-
Technical Committee on Enhancement Proposal Processes
- Goal: Upgrade and improvements over REP
- Chair: Geoff Biggs (presented by Vanessa Yamzon Orsi on behalf of Geoff Biggs)
- Members: PMC Leads
- Update:
- Draft of scope and process is in progress, aiming to circulate to the TGC for review in the March 2025 meeting, however there is a possibility of an upcoming extension request
- Items in discussion: platform for collecting, reviewing and discussing enhancement proposals, process for handling backlog
-
SIG on Interoperability
- Chair: Michael Grey
- In this month’s meeting, Aaron Chong (Intrinsic) presented on recent developments on RMF-web that improves modularity.
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Results of vote to recommend adoption of GAI policy
- The received votes are as follows:
- 5 for, 1 abstention; quorum was not reached and therefore the motion is lost. - Discussion opened regarding two topics:
- Broader discussion on voting and how to encourage more votes
- Specific discussion regarding why this particular motion did not attain the required quorum.
- Takeaways:
- Explore increased asynchronous communication methods to give members more time to study and discuss issues.
- Explore options for asynchronous voting to remove hindrances from live voting during TGC meetings, consider methods for preserving discussions and voting records by matter.
- More explicit calls to action in communications and increase in follow-ups.
- Review charter specifications and amend them if necessary.
- The received votes are as follows:
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Report on progress on federated mirroring
- The effort falls under discussions within the OSRA as to how we could do more to make ROS and other project resources more available to those in the community who are not able to reliably access centralized resources like GitHub, ROS wiki, and other documentation sites hosted in the United States.
- We have existing guides but some information is outdated. We need a new and more comprehensive guide with expanded information and a way to verify that a mirror of a repository matches what is available.
- Currently assessing tools that would make this possible, and further work on building this guide is on the Infra project team’s radar.
- Discussions were had regarding the timeline and resources needed vs other Infra team projects, approach to project execution, and impact on ROS metrics and assessing community growth.
-
New Business
- Welcome to new TGC members
Several new members are joining the TGC from this meeting:- Bence Magyar (Locus) - ROS Controls Project Leader
- Clara Berendsen (Ekumen) - Infrastructure PMC Representative
- Daniel Gordon (Huawei) - Gold Representative
- Christian Henkel (Bosch) - Gold Representative
- Maria Carolina Vergo (ROS-I) - Silver Representative
Other Items
- None
Adjournment - Vanessa Yamzon Orsi adjourned the meeting at 15:25 UTC.
ACTION ITEMS
- The meeting minutes will be circulated to the TGC for review and approval before the next meeting by the TGC Chair.
- Steven! Ragnarok (Infra PMC Lead) to send a summary of the federated mirroring progress report to the TGC.
- The TGC Chair will lead the research on async communication and voting mechanism improvements.