Hello,
The AWS RoboMaker team is pleased to announce the creation of the ROS 2 Tooling Working Group (WG) .
The objective of this working group will be to develop and maintain ROS 2 tools. A tool, in this context, is software supporting developer productivity or robot operation. Examples of existing tools under this definition are rviz, rqt, and rosbag.
Please note that we will try a more structured approach with this working group. Specifically, this working group will manage the roadmap, contribution, and ownership of subprojects. All owned GitHub repositories will live in the working group GitHub organization: ros-tooling. The working group will start by owning the ROS 2 cross-compilation tool, to try out and iron the new process.
The first meeting of the ROS 2 Tooling Working Group will be on 2019-10-18T16:00:00Z → 2019-10-18T17:00:00Z. We will present the ROS 2 WG governance model and discuss improvements to the cross-compilation tool.
If you have any question about the process, please reach out to me: tmoulard@amazon.com
Thank you!
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I am happy to see the ROS 2 Tooling WG is formed and thank you for driving the first meeting. In additions to the date and time, do you mind to share the link of the online meeting? Thanks!
rviz itself is a Qt application and that won’t change.
That being said there are multiple web-based alternatives which aim to provide similar functionality as rviz (one example is rvizweb but there are certainly more and probably more feature rich ones). Both approaches will likely coexist since they satisfy different use cases.
Is there a particular technical reason why the “primary” (and I know that’s a wish-y wash-y definition - but the main supported/used tool) robot visualization tool couldn’t/shouldn’t be in the webrviz? Long term, I could in concept think that rviz would sunset for rvizweb.
I’ve seen other companies with web rviz like things (Cruise, amongst a few others) but none are well supported or full featured to rely on or bother to finish development myself due to lack of long-term support.
This isn’t probably the place for this conversation, but I’ve been thinking about this recently and a tooling WG seems like a good a place as any I’ve seen.
rviz is simply the longest existing, most feature rich, most frequently used tool which exists at the moment. That is probably the only reason why you can consider it to be the “primary” tool. While the web-based alternatives all have there benefits there are simply cases where rviz outperforms them (feature wise, performance wise, or in some other aspect).
Nothing prevents any other tool to become more used and feature rich. But as you mentioned yourself none are well support or full features at the moment - so some people have to commit the resources to make it a superior choice.
All good points, I’m just throwing that out there as a potential candidate then for the tooling group should anyone else have a desire for it. I’m not a web developer but I would love to see webrviz/similar be the defacto standard, in lets say, 3 years. In browser seems to be the way things are going.
@smac Future direction for RViz is an excellent topic of discussion for the working group as we move forward. However, lets not derail this thread by diving too deep into it here
The scope is starting small and the plan is to evolve over time as the governance and ownership model for the WG evolve. We want to set the WG up for successful work toward feature development by being careful about focus.
Thanks got it @Thomas_Moulard, the odd thing is the top post says it’s on the 18th(Friday), but the invite I received says it’s on the 20th(Sunday).
@Thomas_Moulard I personally don’t have the bandwidth to join this working group, but I wanted to point out that the time you have chosen completely excludes anyone in Asia from joining. Please consider either rotating the meeting time through the time zones (so that everyone has a turn at the sucky time), or at least shifting it a couple of hours earlier or few hours later so that it falls outside the midnight-to-6am range for Asia. Probably a couple of hours earlier would work best for America and Europe.
