ROS 2 TSC Meeting Minutes: 2019-12-19

General
1

ROS 2 TSC Meeting Minues: 2019-12-19

  • Attendees
    • Matt Hansen - Intel
    • Toffee Albina - Toyota Research Institute
    • Will Son - ROBOTIS
    • Lokesh Kumar Goel - LG Electronics
    • Jaime Martin Losa - eProsima
    • Steve Macenski - Samsung Research
    • Ralph Lange - Bosch
    • Joe Speed - ADLINK Technology
    • Erik Boasson - ADLINK Technology
    • Aaron Blasdel - Amazon
    • Brian Gerkey, Tully Foote, Louise Poubel - Open Robotics
    • Sean Yen - Microsoft
    • Sid Faber - Canonical
    • Jerry Towler - SwRI, representing CCDC-GVSC
  • Old business
    • [5 min][Gerkey] Present revised trademark policy, to be published immediately.
    • [10 min][Gerkey] ROS 2 Essentials discussion
      • Corollary topic: pending new member applications
  • New business
    • [10 min][Thomas or delegate] Eloquent release postmortem
      • Things we should sustain:
        • A single date for API and feature freeze (in contrast to two separate dates we had for Dashing)
      • Things we should improve:
        • Focus on LTS releases
          • From Foxy, back off to annual releases?
        • Improve automation of creation of a new release
          • But maybe less important if we do it less often
    • [5min][Ralph] Copyright header in source files of core repos. Add “and contributors” or similar? Or even use NOTICE file in repo root?
      • // Copyright © 2019 - for information on the respective copyright owner
        // see the NOTICE file and/or the repository https://github.com/repo.
        • Gerkey to research and respond to TSC
  • Recurring business
    • Next ROS 2 distro release - Foxy
      • Update to REP 2000 for minimum requirements: see ros-infrastructure/rep#217
      • [10 min][Thomas or delegate] Wish list for Foxy from the Open Robotics team (excerpt of the roadmap page). These items are what we consider high priority to tackle; please raise a hand if you can contribute!
        • Changes affecting API
          • Revisit 1-to-1 mapping of ROS nodes to DDS participants
          • API review, specifically user facing API in rclcpp and rclpy (also necessary for quality levels)
          • Revisit message allocators, consider using std::polymorphic_allocator to address problems with custom allocators
        • Missing feature - valuable for porting code
          • Introspect QoS settings for remote topics (e.g. enables recording reliable and best-effort topics)
          • Rate and sleep using a specific clock (e.g. simtime)
          • Logging subsystem: configuration file, per-logger configuration (ala rqt_logger_level)
          • Launch: support substitution to use xacro to expand a parameter file
        • Executor improvements and determinism (cf. Real-Time WG)
          • Performance improvements
          • Fair scheduling (deterministic FIFO)
          • Working with callback groups (necessary for the above)
        • New features
          • RMW interface: notification about event, e.g. new entities, matching of endpoints, etc.
          • RWW configuration: unified/standard way of configuring the middleware
          • rosbag: support recording services (and actions)
          • ros1_bridge: support actions
      • Gerkey to consider creating “middleware WG”
      • Gerkey to work with DThomas to produce editable roadmap for WG leads and other to claim items
      • [Jaime] Consider exposing DDS keys.
    • Working groups [5 mins each]
      • [Jaime] Embedded
        • Low participation: It would be nice to have participation from Open Robotics. Almost all people from Asia.
        • Survey showed interest in small systems based on microprocessors not just microcontrollers
        • [Brian] Suggest inviting Auterion, PX4 community, iRobot
      • [Matt] Navigation
      • [Dejan] Real-time
      • [Geoff, in absentia] Safety
        • Alias Robotics has shown an interest in being involved when security concerns come up, which is welcome as security is essential for safety.
        • Little progress on the patterns catalogue due to time constraints. Will pick up the activity again early in the new year.
      • [Sid, for Kyle] Security
        • Met on 11 Dec 2019
        • Meeting notes are now in the wiki
        • Discussed a logging plugin. Current direction is to use native DDS logging and port logs to a standard transport like syslog. This approach would require a way to demangling DDS topics into the ROS namespace. The DDS logging spec is vague, we may consider driving more precision into logging requirements.
          • ApexAI is writing middleware logging into log4 compatible format logging.apache.org which is widely used and supported by most analysis tools including Splunk
        • Creating a repo specific to security. Working on a charter for how the working group would take ownership & introduce subprojects, and on handling reported vulnerabilities.
        • Reviewed the proposed Node Interface Definition Language (NoDL) design document: benefits for security, for non-default QOS, for dynamic configuration at launch time.
      • [Aaron] Tooling
        • Last meeting on 2019-12-06. Project updates:
          • cross_compile - ROS 1 support WIP
          • system_metrics_collector - preparing first release
          • Rosbag2 - compression & splitting WIP
          • Github actions based CI added
        • Governance: added a template for project adoption
        • Presentation: Silexica performance framework
        • WIP on perf testing at build.ros2.org
        • Next meeting: 2019-12-20
3 Likes
2

It is already the plan to slow down ROS 2 releases to once per year. That being said it will need to be discusses if every release would receive LTS or if that only applies to some releases (e.g. every two years).

See the PR for an REP proposing a rolling distribution: ros-infrastructure/rep#209.