ROS 2 TSC Meeting Minutes: 2019-06-20

General
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ROS 2 TSC Meeting Minutes: 2019-06-20

  • Attendees
    • Open Robotics: Brian G, Louise, William
    • LGE: Seonman
    • Tier IV: Geoff
    • eProsima: Jaime
    • Intel: Matt H.
    • Apex.AI: Lyle
    • ROBOTIS: Pyo
    • TRI: Toffee
    • Bosch: Karsten
    • Acutronic Robotics: Victor
    • Amazon: Rutvik
    • ARM: Filipe
    • Microsoft: Sean
    • GVSC (TARDEC): Jon Smereka
  • Old business
    • [2 mins] [Gerkey] ROS Elevator Pitch Brochure
    • [2 mins] [Gerkey] ROS trademark update
      • Draft use policy under development, led by Geoff with input from Brian G., Jaime, and some others.
        • Brian to respond to outstanding feedback.
      • Goal: finish first draft by the end of June, go to legal review, then bring to TSC for discussion.
  • New business:
    • [5 mins] [Gerkey] ROSCon updates
    • [10 mins] [Gerkey] Dashing debrief
      • How did we do with the release?
        • What went well?
          • (Victor) Thanks, their porting went well. Pre-release of Dashing was rather useful (empowered a complete port within a week of time, including external ROS 2 packages for manipulation)
        • What could be improved?
          • (Matt H. for nav team) Late changes in Fast-RTPS (1.7.2 - 1.8.0) were disruptive, happened in May, still recovering.
            • We should integrate more Nav tests to avoid breaks like this.
            • Nav team has tests which are docker-ized and use gazebo.
            • Lifecycle node greatly increased number of topics and services, making nav test stress the middleware in new ways that aren’t caught by existing tests.
            • ROS 2 team to integrate a periodic (nightly?) version of Matt’s nav test.
              • Future goal: distill nav test to its basic stress-testing characteristics without the complexity of nav or gazebo.
          • (Geoff) In the future ROS 2 release team could take in results from external CI as well (e.g. Autoware) during the release testing.
          • (Victor) geometry2 was released late. Fixed though.
          • (Karsten) issues with getting ROS 1 package maintainers to be responsive to changes (specifically ones needed for ROS 2)
    • [10 mins] [Gerkey] New member application(s) discussion
  • Standing updates:
    • [20 min] [William / All] Roadmap planning - Eloquent Elusor
      • Master ticket is ready, seeded with Open Robotics’ planned tasks: https://github.com/ros2/ros2/issues/734
        • List is work in progress, subject to change
        • Getting back to rviz to fill in some long-standing gaps
          • (Matt H.) Trouble with matching QoS types, e.g., for a map publisher with latching-like behavior. Issue to be opened on rviz.
        • Add the ability to do dynamic_reconfigure-like GUI features via rqt for handling params.
        • Plan to get performance tests integrated into main CI system
      • (Rutvik) How about creating a user-focused theme for Eloquent, to help motivate which features are to be prioritized? Volunteers to work on that:
        • Rutvik
        • Brian
        • Geoff
      • All are invited to add their own planned contributions as comments to the Eloquent master ticket.
    • TSC members updates:
      • ROBOTIS
      • Apex.AI
        1. From https://github.com/ros2/ros2/issues/607#issuecomment-465832840 we will for ROS 2 E work on the performance_test part. Major contributions include
          • Results will be dumped into the SQL-like database
          • Multi-process support
          • ros2 launch support
          • Aggregation of the test results into the test management suite (which will then allow regression monitoring and better bug triaging)
        2. Further contributions that we could bring in (items with * are on the https://index.ros.org/doc/ros2/Roadmap/; we would contribute 1-2 things based on the popular demand):
          • Static code analysers (we are evaluating LDRA, TrustInSoft)
          • Dynamic code analysers (e.g. Silexica SLX C++)
          • *Rewritten rmw layer (super easy integration of DDS implementations, exposed full DDS API, 1 copy operation only, …)
          • *rmw that includes RTI Connext Micro
          • Documentation testing extension to launch_testing (in which the documentation files written in markdown are instrumented such that they become integration tests)
          • Presentation of best practices needed for development according to the ISO 26262 (FuSa for automotive)
          • *Upstream the velodyne driver from https://gitlab.com/AutowareAuto/AutowareAuto/tree/master/src/drivers to https://github.com/ros-drivers
          • Support for ROS2 compilation on QNX
          • Configuration management system. We see these use cases which ROS 2 parameters do not satisfy:
            • Global configuration that many nodes share (e.g. RTOS priorities, vehicle dimensions, …)
            • Process level configuration
            • Communication configuration (DDS Connext Micro)
            • *Waitset implementation in rclcpp
      • eProsima
        • Fast RTPS 1.8.1 to be released next week
          • Liveliness completed & bug fixes
        • Micro XRCE-DDS 1.1: To be released also, aligned with Fast RTPS 1.8.1
          • Micro-ROS to follow.
        • Discovery Server: Public release next week.
        • Performance Tests: Public end of this month
          • Dedicated machines.
        • ROS2 Integration Service
          • Based on OSRF SOSS
          • ROSIN Project
      • Tier IV
        • We have 8 half-FTEs beginning work on ROS 2 contributions (total 4 FTEs)
        • Proposed contributions for ROS 2 E:
          • Debian as Tier 1 (preferred) or Tier 2 platform
          • Real-time publish/subscribe capability via adding new executors and/or implementing callback groups (need to consult William to determine specific work required; will also of course coordinate with real-time WG)
          • Implement an rmw library for RTI’s real-time DDS (Connext DDS Cert)
      • LGE
        • On Friday (6/21) we should be able to submit a PR to build webOS OSE with ROS 2 dashing release that’s upgraded to OpenEmbedded 2.6 Thud;
          • We tested it on raspberrypi3 and emulator (qemux86). It depends on OSE releasing the updated OpenEmbedded support.
        • Need help from OSRF to finish the transfer of meta-ros to ros-infrastructure (from bmwcarit) so PR can be submitted
      • Microsoft
        • Ongoing project to do Windows binary packaging for ROS 2. Idea is to use bloom to produce vcpkg data and then produce chocolatey artifacts. More work needed to better connect vcpkg and chocolatey.
        • Working on producing Dashing binaries from MS build farm.
    • Working group updates:
      • [3 min] [Matt H] Navigation
        • Still wrapping up release for Dashing; aiming for end of June.
      • [3 min] [Rutvik] Security
      • [3 min] [Lyle] Real-time
        1. ROS 2 real-time workshop was accepted at ROSCon
        2. First meeting action items:
          • Dejan to provide a use case description and the requirements
          • Find someone that will lead the work on real-time capable rmw
          • Get William to present his findings on real-timeness in rcutils, rcl, and rclcpp
          • Create a shared repository for tools used for static and dynamic code analysis as well as tracing
          • Present Bosch paper and real-time with Callback+Executor in detail in one of the next meetings
          • QA RT buildfarm being finalized and prepared for public release.
          • First peek available at https://acutronicrobotics.com/news/dashing-ros/
      • [3 min] [Geoff] Safety
        • Held a somewhat better attended meeting (5 participants, so extrapolating we should have half the ROS community by mid-next year)
        • Safety-critical WG
        • There is significant interest in safety, but most people don’t know exactly what is needed or what to contribute
        • We have some concrete actions we can work on (see above topic) but are resource-constrained
      • [3 min] [Karsten] Embedded
        • Need more activity; Acutronic, eProsima are interested to participate
      • [3 min] [VĂ­ctor] Manipulation
2 Likes
2

@dirk-thomas, TSC members, community:

we would appreciate some feedback on what you think the most valuable contributions among these ones would be (originally listed above):

  1. Static code analysers (we are evaluating LDRA, TrustInSoft)
  2. Dynamic code analysers (e.g. Silexica SLX C++)
  3. Rewritten rmw layer (super easy integration of DDS implementations, exposed full DDS API, 1 copy operation only, …)
  4. Rmw that includes RTI Connext Micro
  5. Documentation testing extension to launch_testing (in which the documentation files written in markdown are instrumented such that they become integration tests)
  6. Presentation of best practices needed for development according to the ISO 26262 (Functional Safety for automotive)
  7. Upstream the velodyne driver from https://gitlab.com/AutowareAuto/AutowareAuto/tree/master/src/drivers to https://github.com/ros-drivers
  8. Support for ROS2 QNX (compilation and testing (we actually got python and thus colcon to run on QNX)
  9. Configuration management system
2 Likes
3

In order of preference from most-wanted to not-as-most-wanted:

  • 3
  • 5
  • 8
  • 4 (We have someone working on this part time; would be happy to follow your lead)
  • 1
  • 2
  • 7
  • 9
  • 6

It would be great to have #6 in the safety group, since that’s already one of our possible action items.