ROS 2 TSC Meeting Minutes: 2020-03-18

General
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ROS 2 TSC Meeting Agenda

2020-03-19

  • Attendees

    • Aaron Blasdel (Amazon)
    • Joe Speed (ADLINK)
    • Lokesh Kumar Goel (LG Electronics)
    • Dejan Pangercic (Apex.AI) - participation pending a sleeping baby​:baby::zzz:
    • Jaime Martin Losa (eProsima)
    • Steve Macenski (Samsung Research)
    • Geoffrey Biggs (Tier IV)
    • Thomas Moulard (Amazon)
    • Sean Yen (Microsoft)
    • Kyle Fazzari (Canonical)
    • Karsten Knese (Bosch)
    • Brian Gerkey, Dirk Thomas, Louise Poubel, Tully Foote (Open Robotics)
    • Toffee Albina (TRI)
    • Jerry Towler (SwRI, representing GVSC)
    • Will Son (ROBOTIS)
    • Harold Yang (Intel)

  • Preliminaries

  • Old business

    • [DThomas] Update on REP 2005: ROS 2 Standard Library (née ROS 2 Essentials)
      • Goal of having this be a way to scope what the TSC is responsible for and expected to contribute to.
      • Open question with connection to REP 2004, discussion in the thread.
      • We should sort out REP 2005 open questions over one call with a subset of TSC, to be scheduled by Gerkey. Goal is to merge before the next TSC meeting.
        • DThomas
        • Gerkey
        • Biggs
        • Kyle
        • Steve
        • Aaron B
        • Lokesh Kumar Goel
    • [Knese] ROS2 introduction material for various stakeholders.
      • Feedback from Bosch was provided to Open Robotics to inform the forthcoming ros.org refresh
    • [Gerkey] ROSCon 2020: proceeding as planned and monitoring the situation.
      • [Biggs] Same for ROSCon JP
    • [Gerkey] Default RMW for Foxy
      • Not changing for Foxy (May 2020) because of risk resulting from such a late change.
      • Working on defining a process to follow.

  • New business

    • [Joe] CI topic was raised in ROS Tooling WG
      • Eager to help improve, some notes:
      • Separable infrastructure vs code issues improvements on both sides possible.
      • [Dejan] Similar triage process at Apex, can give some guidance. Smaller scope than entire ROS buildfarm.
      • [Blasdel] There might be (Jenkins) plugins that can track flakey tests.
      • [Thomas M] Smaller isolated systems are easier for community contributions, only useful for CI though.
      • [Gerkey] Open Robotics now staffing a rotating full-time build farmer who manages the running systems and when possible makes improvements to them.
    • [Fazzari] A TSC GitHub team would be useful
      • Which org? Best candidate is osrf. Tully to investigate.
    • [Fazzari] Working Group template is ready for review by TSC
      • Similar to Tooling and Security working groups, not required to be the same, but could give a good baseline for other working groups.
      • Asking for TSC review and approval. Fazzari and Thomas M to do via Discourse poll in tsc category or GitHub review (using aforementioned TSC team).
    • [Gerkey] Discussion on TSC structure and membership criteria
      • Consensus: some improvements can be made but overall the present approach is working well and is preferred over making significant changes.

  • Recurring business

    • Next ROS 2 distro release
      • [DThomas] [10 mins] Update on schedule and status
        • build.ros2.org is using Ubuntu Focal for Foxy for a while
        • ci.ros2.org is switching all Foxy jobs from Ubuntu Bionic to Focal very soon
        • Merging post-Foxy release schedule PR soon
          • Yearly release
          • LTS - even years
        • Merging Foxy details PR soon
          • The C++ minimum version is still set at C++17 (even though until now we don’t have C++17 specific code, usage of std::pmr::polymorphic_allocator might land if we have time for it)
            • Option: possibility to reimplement using C++14
            • Option: ifdef if polymorphic allocator isn’t available keep existing (broken) behavior
            • Consider changing to “C++14 plus polymorphic allocator”
          • Eclipse Cyclone DDS has been bumped to tier-1
          • Connext likely to stay at version 5.3.1 due to lack of contribution (from RTI or others)
          • Waiting for a clarification on OpenEmbedded since it is the only platform which changes the targeted OS version during a ROS distro cycle
          • Cent OS 7 support seems to be not feasible since it only ships with Python 3.6 and we have settled on the minimum version to be Python 3.7 for quite some time
        • Participant 2 node mapping: ongoing
          • RMW FastRTPS up-to-date; RMW CycloneDDS works “as-is”, doing further refinement; Connext likely to keep current behavior
        • Improvements to executor: ongoing work with Bosch
    • Working groups [5 mins each]
      • [Speed] Edge AI
        • Strong interest and participation
        • OpenCV is where ML is used the most
        • Get Foxy to OpenCV 4.2 to facilitate use of ML
        • Not much ML in ros core yet besides OpenCV
        • good contribution by Intel, mostly OpenVINO
        • Note: most ML in ros is private repos, prototypes or orphaned
      • [Macenski] Navigation
        • Finished documentation sprint
        • Cross-WG effort for Navigation2 stability testing had great results
        • Charging forward towards the V1 release. Targeting Foxy but may take til end of 2020 with current participation rates.
        • Reducing meetings to every other week
        • Question on “official” drivers and “official” packages
      • [Pangercic] Real-time
        • Many new people joined the working group => Increased interest and participation
        • We are currently in touch with the ros_control working group. => https://github.com/ros-controls/ros2_control/issues/48#issuecomment-599695888
          • They are interested in feedback for their controller manager, new features for executors and how to measure the executor real-time performance.
          • We expect to have feedback in both directions.
        • Feedback for the ROS community and possible improvements
          • microROS and ROS2 was shown at the ERF in Malaga => lots of interest, participation: 70% academia, 30% industry (based on a poll in one workshop, that took place in the larger conference room)
          • General feedback (AI for OSRF): major packages (navigation2, MoveIt2, drivers for sensors) not supported && documentation missing on the ros2 website
          • General feedback (AI for OSRF): Can we have 1pager for ROS 2 (for decision makers who are not fully technical) to explain what is ROS 2 and how can it be used in products => broader topic is to have more marketing material
          • how to accelerate porting to ROS 2
          • [Gerkey] This information was also included in the detailed feedback from Bosch on improvements for ros.org.
        • ROS 2 on QNX
        • rclcpp executor refactoring
          • A PR (making executors optional, adding a wait-set) is forthcoming from William
        • rclc executor
        • SLX ROS Performance Testing Platform
          • We are looking into possibilities to setup the testing without realtime constraints at first as a real-time capable HW is not available on AWS (at least to our knowledge).
      • [Biggs] Safety
        • No progress. Need to review usefulness of this WG.
          • Decision: Put on hiatus pending discussion of a productive way forward
      • [Fazzari] Security
        • WG has taken over maintenance of SROS2 utilities
        • Completed design doc for switching from nodes to contexts, had excellent discussion there
        • Draft PR in place to switch to contexts in SROS2 utilities
        • PR up to enable Tooling WG’s GitHub actions in SROS2 utilities
        • Designing/reviewing RMW integration necessary to enable security logging (tying in with Canonical’s work adding a logging plugin to Fast RTPS)
        • Leadership created WG template with Tooling WG
        • Nearly done enabling security in rmw_cyclonedds
      • [Blasdel] Tooling
        • More WG activity this cycle from TSC members, such as Bosch and Microsoft.
        • Cross Compile: New release with lots of usability improvements
        • Rosbag2: work begun to support QoS handling (record offered QoS profiles and automatically use correct ones for recording and playback)
        • System Metrics: Work ongoing to implement Topic Statistics utilities and integrate into rclcpp Subscriptions
        • Github Action CI: Improving stability of Windows support
      • [jaime] Embedded
        • Micro-ROS: updated docs and tutorials
        • Zephyr is now integrated in the build system along with NuttX and FreeRTOS
      • [Karsten] ROS-control
        • First Kick-off meeting last week Wednesday
        • Broad Audience (roughly 10 people) to get up to speed and iterate over design docs
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