ROS 2 TSC Meeting Minutes: 2020-02-20

General
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ROS 2 TSC Meeting Agenda: 2020-02-20

  • Attendees
    • Aaron Blasdel - AWS Robotics
    • Thomas Moulard - AWS Robotics
    • Matt Hansen - AWS Robotics
    • Lokesh Kumar Goel - LG Electronics
    • Joe Speed - ADLINK Technology
    • Will Son - ROBOTIS
    • Toffee Albina - TRI
    • Karsten Knese - Bosch
    • Brian Gerkey, Tully Foote, Dirk Thomas - Open Robotics
    • Steve Macenski - Samsung Research
    • Kyle Fazzari - Canonical
    • Sid Faber - Canonical
    • Jaime Martin - eProsima
    • Sean Yen - Microsoft
    • Geoffrey Biggs - Tier IV
    • Dejan Pangercic, APEX
    • Harold Yang - Intel
    • Jerry Towler - SwRI, representing CCDC-GVSC
  • Preliminaries
    • [LG] Lokesh Kumar Goel replacing Brian Shin on TSC for LG Electronics
  • Old business
    • [Gerkey] Reminder about REP 2005: ROS 2 Standard Library (née ROS 2 Essentials)
      • We’re resolving some questions of scope and naming.
      • If your ROS 2 contributions aren’t represented on the list, then propose to add them (and/or shift your focus of contribution).
      • We should publish the REP soon.
      • [Biggs] We should make a schedule for examining / reviewing comments in each distro cycle.
    • [Blasdel] PAL & Amazon are talking about a ros control working group to get ros control ported to ROS2.
      • Still in the design discussion phase
      • Bosch and Picknik have also expressed interest in contributing to the ros control working group
      • Bosch and PAL are focusing on porting controllers ROS1 -> ROS2
      • Picknik is planning to start on the MoveIt portions to ros2 control
      • [Knese] In contact with real-time WG; planning to test with humanoids, among other platforms
    • [Knese] ROS2 introduction material for complete beginners. I’ve remembered a call for video material for an introduction video.
      • [Gerkey] It would be great to have an explainer video similar to what was done for micro-ROS. Open Robotics wiling to help.
      • [Knese] Will talk with colleagues and come back with plan.
  • New business
    • [Gerkey] ROSCon 2020 will be held Nov 14-16 in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA.
      • Sponsorship prospectus is forthcoming.
      • First time that we’re doing ROSCon not collocated with an existing IEEE conference. Instead we’ll have other events collocate with ROSCon.
    • [Biggs] Do we need to formalise the working groups process, rules, etc?
      • [Foote] Before revising charter formally, use formation and governance process from an existing WG (e.g., Security, Tooling) as an example.
        • [Blasdel] I can talk with Tooling WG team to draft some amount of documentation
    • [Knese] Default RMW for Foxy
      • Bosch has started efforts to integrate iceoryx into cyclone. Pushing cyclone to become Tier1 implementation for ROS2.
      • Why do we have a single default RMW? Why not ship with cyclone and FastRTPS and let the user decide over a simple env variable which one to use?
        • [D. Thomas] That is what we do now: ship all the implementations that build and let the user select via environment variable. But we still need some default that will be used if the user doesn’t set any variable.
        • [Macenski] Good default behavior is key; out of the box user experience is important
      • Given multiple open source Tier 1 implementations, what is the process for deciding which is the default, both in general, and specifically for Foxy?
        • [Pangercic] for the formalized criteria I suggest to run a quantitative performance as described in our paper: https://www.apex.ai/post/performance-testing-in-ros-2
        • [Biggs] 3 categories we care about: quantitative (e.g., performance), feature completeness (e.g., security, QoS), qualitative (e.g., out of the box experience, responsiveness of vendor to bugs and requests)
        • [Fazzari] It’s important to know what is being targeted early in development cycles, and LTS cycles have higher risk of supporting a decision longer. Also, you get most feedback from “real” users once you release. Getting that feedback by making experimental changes in a non-LTS release to inform the next LTS can be useful.
        • [Martin Losa] Important to clarify the expected supported use cases that we can expect to test
        • [Gerkey] Different defaults may be appropriate in different use cases (e.g., localhost / LAN for an autonomous vehicle vs. wifi for a fleet of logistics robots)
        • [Will Son] Educational sector criteria would be : easy to maintain, better performance with less resource use, stable connectivity on limited environment like classrooms
        • [Gerkey] To come back to TSC with evaluation criteria and plan.
    • [Martin Losa] Micro-ROS supports now Zephyr.
  • Recurring business
  • [D. Thomas] Timeline / support length for future ROS distros
    • Foxy proposed to be supported for 3 years
    • Yearly releases after that
    • Two options for post-Foxy:
      • Same level of support
        • Even year releases aligning with Ubuntu LTS get 5 years, odd year releases get 4 years (limitted by the already one year old Ubuntu LTS)
          • Concern: can we (OR as well as all maintainers) maintain up to 5 distros being active at the same time?
        • All releases get 3 years
          • Concern: not long-term enough for some users?
      • Uneven support - LTS vs. non-LTS
        • Concern: are enough users adopting the non-LTS distros?
  • Working groups [5 mins each]
    • [Speed] Edge AI
      • Kick-off call next week
      • can expect ADLINK, Samsung, TierIV, Intel, AWS, OR, other orgs and interested individuals
    • [Macenski] Navigation
      • Onboarding 4 Jr developers from the community to help get through the backlog.
      • Somewhat dire need of at least 1 more part-time experienced co-maintainer. If this is something you or your customers rely on having exist and maintained, now’s a time to step up. Currently only maintainer & reviewer.
      • Documentation sprint to clean up and extend Navigation2 docs (https://ros-planning.github.io/navigation2/)
      • Retargeting work for 2020 to stability (https://github.com/ros-planning/navigation2/projects/2) and taking on more of a PM role.
    • [Pangercic] Real-time
    • [Fazzari] Security
      • Most recent WG meeting was last week (notes)
      • Ongoing work: switch to one DDS participant per context
      • Exploring default SROS 2 policies to enable debugging (eg, rqt), and also easily enable encryption
      • Aggregating feedback for quality metrics (https://github.com/ros-infrastructure/rep/pull/218): how should security be added?
      • Vulnerability Disclosure Policy proposed
    • [Blasdel] Tooling
      • Implementation is beginning on a library to bring Topic Statistics to ROS 2
      • ros_cross_compile is making quality improvements and progress towards incremental builds
      • Github CI Actions were officially announced to the community and we’ve had a lot of positive feedback, the Security WG is integrating them into some of their projects already
      • rosbag2 compression is now exposed via the CLI
      • Unfortunately, compressed ros2 bag files are still significantly larger than ros 1 bags. We will engage the community to brainstorm options as this is impacting developer workflow (harder to transfer data between robots and developer workstations, for instance).
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Curious about this one. Are there any further details on it? We are looking for Micro-ROS support on Zephyr.

o
[Martin Losa] Micro-ROS supports now Zephyr.

BR,

Harold