ROS 2 TSC Meeting January 20th, 2022

General
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ROS 2 TSC Meeting Agenda January 20th, 2022

ROS 2 TSC Contribution Report-1-20-2022.pdf (157.0 KB)

  • Attendees

    • Oliver Michel, Community Representative
    • Andrei Kholodnyi, Wind River
    • Lyle Johnson, Apex.AI
    • Steve Macenski, Samsung
    • Chris Lalancette, William Woodall, Tully Foote, Geoff Biggs, Kat Scott, Louise Poubel, Audrow Nash, Open Robotics
    • Will Son, ROBOTIS
    • Ian McMahon, Calder Phillips-Grafflin, Toyota Research Institute
    • Ralph Lange, Bosch
    • Lou Amadio, Microsoft
    • Patrick Musau
    • Jeremie Deray (artivis) | Canonical
    • Tomoya Fujita, Sony
    • Aaron Blasdel, Emerson Knapp - Amazon
    • Jerry Towler - SwRI, representing GVSC
    • Alberto Soragna - iRobot
    • Herb Kuta, LG Electronics

  • Preliminaries

    • [Kat ][1 min] Please remember to fill out your contribution report at the bottom of this document prior to the meeting.
    • New Human-Robot Interaction REP Proposal
    • Shout out to @smac for being awesome. The Nav2 setup guide is beautiful, and we should all aspire to documentation like this.
      • Samsung Research Philippians really! I just helped motivate it :slight_smile:

  • Old business

    • [Kat][1 min] Update on Developer Experience Working Group

  • New business

    • [Kuta][2 min] Message from LG
      • Executive change of direction: “LG has made a difficult decision to suspend our activities on SVL Simulator and Embedded Robotics. Hence, our engineering team has been directed to focus on other areas which are more strategically important to LG’s business and that unfortunately means that we will not be able to continue working on meta-ros and meta-ros-webos. Because of this, we are resigning from ROS 2 TSC for 2022.”
      • SVL Simulator will no longer be maintained. Details can be found in the sunset announcement.
      • meta-ros and meta-ros-webos will no longer be maintained.
    • [Coleman][3 min] Picknik Representative Change to @Henning_Kayser
    • [Kat][3 min] Welcome Community Representatives
      • Short Recap of the process
      • New representatives introduce themselves.
        • @Patrick Musau
        • @Brett Aldrich
        • @Oliver Michel
    • [Biggs/Soragna: 10min] Client Libraries Working Group
    • [Robinson: 10min] Hardware Interfaces Working Group
      • Matt to provide synopsis – slides
      • Full Discussion on Discourse
      • Motion to create a new working group and vote.
      • TSC Charter process and setup documentation.
      • Steve – who would be contributors?
        • Main contributors would be from ROS-I
      • Big focus on reference implementations for industrial manipulators. Also building standard messages.
      • Motion Lou Amadio – Seconded by Uma
        • Motion passes
    • [Blasdel: 25 min] Potential New TSC Member: Foxglove

  • Recurring business

    • Next ROS 2 distro release
    • Working groups [<=5 mins each]

      • [Bence] Control

        • More work on lifecycle support for hardware components
        • New roadmap format using kanban style
        • Started using hashtags for PRs: “#api-breaking” and “#abi-breaking”
          • Set up industrial_ci ABI checks for foxy and galactic branches
        • Runtime re-configuration of controllers/controller_manager

      • [Angelo Cosaro] Edge AI

      • [Martin Losa] Embedded

        • January Meeting will be a week after the January ROS2 TSC. The main points in the Agenda:

        • Presentation by Benjamin CabĂ©, Principal Program Manager at Microsoft Azure IoT

          • As invited speaker, Benjamin CabĂ© will make a presentation about micro-ROS and Azure
          • Azure IoT platform presentation about how to better bridge the gap between the safety-critical, often microcontroller-based, world of #robotics and #IoT

        • Presentation by Dominik Nowak, CEO at Husarion | CTO at Husarnet. Dominik will cover the following agenda:

          • P2P Access to ESP32 ROS 2 nodes with Micro-ROS and Husarnet VPN
          • ROSbot XL - Micro-ROS based autonomous robot platform

      • [Henning] Manipulation

        • New Releases for Foxy, Galactic, Rolling
        • New Galactic stable branch based on main
        • Doxygen API documentation hosted with GitHub-Pages
        • Coordinated effort to restructure MoveIt Tutorials and How-To Guides

      • [Woodall] Middleware

        • Meeting minutes:
        • Endpoint lifecycle management on Managed Node
        • Clarify ignore_local_publications behavior
        • Bump on items needing review/discussion:
          • callback based rmw API for event executor
          • subordinate nodes with parameters pr
          • wait_for_acknowledge examples
          • ContentFilteredTopic

      • [Macenski] Navigation

        • 2021 metrics
          • 5 Galactic syncs
          • 81% → 89% test coverage
          • 59 individual contributors from ~50 organizations
          • Nav2 paper received 30 citations
          • RPP Controller #4 on ROS Metrics downloads
          • Ended year with ~110 downloads a day and ~2050 page views a day
          • 1600Ă—1097 84.9 KB
        • First time setup guide complete
        • Working on papers regarding Smac Planner work
        • In progress behavioral updates
          • Replan only when existing plan is invalid
          • Patience near goal if something is in the way and the planner tries to reroute significantly further away
        • Adding dynamic composition to stack shortly
        • Improvements to smac planner heuristic by RoboTechVision

      • [Andrei] Real-Time

      • [Biggs] Rust

        • No meetings this month. Work continues on services.

      • [Biggs] Safety

        • Safety survey has been completed. Got more responses than expected. Results will be discussed in February meeting.

      • [Deray] Security

        • Meeting held on January 11 2022 (recording).
        • Starting the discussion around a reference implementation for SROS 2 (pick a platform, some applications, a scenario etc).

  • [Knapp] Web

    • working to consolidate naming of our github org and https://webtools.ros.org
    • reviewing various overlapping javascript ROS libraries so we can focus our efforts behind one

  • [Knapp/Blasdel] Tooling

5 Likes
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Bummer, and really sorry to hear this @herb-kuta-lge and other LG folks. Thanks for your contributions to meta-ros, for making it great and for maintaining it for the last few years.

meta-ros is a pretty important project for the community and centric to industrial deployment of ROS. There’re many companies depending on it AFAIK. With LG dropping it, will there be Tier 3 [s] support for Humble as indicated in REP-2000? This essentially requires Yocto recipes maintained, tested and released. superflore is a fantastic initiative, but as of today, I already noticed that some Yocto recipes in the rolling branch (across Yocto release branches) have diverged and require updates. This means someone building for rolling today will struggle (which can be translated to Humble soonish).

@Katherine_Scott any plans on who’ll maintain this down the road? If none, I could try and sell this internally at Xilinx and see if I could get the resources to maintain it. I have Yocto and OpenEmbedded experience myself [1] [2] [3]. Let me know if this is of interest please.

  1. Various contributions in the early days of meta-ros through the Beagle-ROS project. ↩︎

  2. My team in the past contributed a straight ROS 2 port of the Yocto recipes at meta-ros2. ↩︎

  3. I’ve been maintaining the firmware for various boards (e.g. KV260 or ZCU102) which is based on Yocto. ↩︎

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I briefly discussed the situation with LG over e-mail. I asked them to do a final discourse post on the topic so we could coordinate a fork or switch maintainers. This has yet to happen. To be quite frank, I’ve been so busy trying to understand the ramifications of the SVL EOL that I haven’t looked into meta-ROS just yet.

I don’t believe there are any plans to pick up support for meta-ros at Open Robotics. I think continued support will require a community member to take over maintainership. I would be more than happy to help facilitate that happening.

2 Likes
4

I made the ask internally and reached out to my management. I’ll follow up if this raises interest in Xilinx and I can get the resources to commit.

Regardless, I think it’d be great to have more groups contributing to meta-ros maintenance as well. Please speak out if you can commit some resources.

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I am definitely interested in contributing, but am constrained on time. I have maintained a fork of the original from BMW/Bulwahn, and submitted upstream PRs back when we were implementing it to improve compatibility. Utilizing Yocto as a foundation for OS images is core to our company from many perspectives: scalability, dependability, security, efficiency, etc. While I believe it should be a requirement for any company that is commercializing ROS on any device, this highlights that it isn’t a first class citizen, and generally isn’t well supported in the ROS community. I understand that tying ROS releases to Ubuntu is makes sense to help with adoption, although IMHO that doesn’t necessarily help for a constrained implementation.

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@Katherine_Scott I am interested in helping with maintaining meta-ros. If they could share any information about the time and effort involved in maintaining all the various Yocto Project and ROS2 releases that would be really helpful. Any information on infrastructure they set up to automate the process would be very useful as well.

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Hi Rob,

You’re going to need to reach out to them directly if you want to take over support. I’m just the messenger. I can put you in touch my contacts at LG, but that is the best I can offer. DM me your e-mail address and I’ll make an introduction.

Be advised that I don’t think this is a trivial effort.

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