ROS 2 TSC Meeting Minutes: 2020-05-21

General
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ROS 2 TSC Meeting Agenda - 2020-05-21

  • Attendees
    • Jaime Martin Losa - eProsima
    • Aaron Blasdel - AWS Robomaker
    • Thomas Moulard - AWS Robomaker
    • Dejan Pangercic - Apex.AI
    • Steve Macenski - Samsung Research
    • Toffee Albina - Toyota Research Institute
    • Kyle Fazzari - Canonical
    • Karsten Knese - Bosch
    • Tom Panzarella - Box Robotics
    • Tully Foote, Louise Poubel, William Woodall, Brian Gerkey, Dirk Thomas - Open Robotics
    • Sean Yen - Microsoft
    • Geoffrey Biggs - Tier IV
    • Lokesh Kumar Goel - LG Electronics
    • Harold Yang - Intel
    • Alberto Soragna - iRobot
    • Will Son - ROBOTIS
    • Joe Speed - ADLINK
  • Preliminaries
    • Introducing Alberto from iRobot and Tom from Box Robotics as observers (invited by Apex.AI)
  • [35 min] Old business
    • [5 min][Gerkey] Update on REP 2005: ROS 2 Common Packages (nĂ©e ROS 2 Standard Library, nĂ©e ROS 2 Essentials)
    • [5 min][Gerkey] Discuss plan for handling pending TSC applications
      • Gerkey to call async vote after meeting
    • [2 min][Gerkey] ROSCon 2020: re-evaluating the situation, with an updated schedule to be published by the end of May.
      • ROSCon JP 2020 (September) has been cancelled.
      • ROSCon FR 2020 (June) has been postponed.
    • [5 min][DThomas] Update on broken (aka flaky) test handling in CI
      • First step: skip them during regular CI: ticketed and implemented.
        • Open Robotics is marking broken tests (to cause them to be skipped) as part of of our regular Build Farmer process
        • Skipped tests still run nightly in separate jobs; examples for Linux and Windows
        • While tickets have been created for marked tests there is atm no process in place to follow up on those
    • [2 min][Fazzari] Status update on WG governance template
      • Seems to be nearing stability
    • [10 min][Biggs] Community representatives on the TSC
      • Proposed additions to the TSC charter have been made
      • There remain some points that need discussion to finalise the text, but in general there is no opposition from TSC members
      • Propose that the changes be adopted, and appropriate people from Open Robotics run an election later this year in conjunction with the timing of ROSCon
      • Biggs to come back to TSC with final proposed diff to charter for vote.
    • [5 min][Gerkey, et al.] Out-of-the-box Wifi Behavior
      • Open Robotics team is starting to look into it, but is resource-limited because of Foxy release
        • Potential workaround (not yet recommended in general): Anecdotal report of “night and day” difference in discovery performance on wifi from switching to client-server discovery (instead of peer-to-peer) in FastRTPS
        • Updated Analysis here
      • Good topic for the long-awaited Middleware WG
    • [2 min][Gerkey] Middleware WG
      • To be convened after Foxy release. Who’s interested in participating?
        • Geoff Biggs
        • Jaime Martin Losa
        • Apex.AI
        • Aaron Blasdel
        • Thomas Moulard
  • New business
    • [~2 mins] [Blasdel] armhf (aka arm32) financial support will not continue.
      • Likely downgrade to Tier 3 support starting in Foxy.
      • If anyone is interested in continuing to support this platform please contact Open Robotics.
    • [~10 mins] [Woodall & Blasdel] Quality Levels REP 2004
      • William presents his great work on REP 2004
      • Discuss TSC interest in declaring their owned packages and moving their owned packages up the Quality Level chain towards Level 1
        • There is in flight work to get ROS core packages to Quality Level 2. If external deps are excluded from the calculation we are on track to hit QL 2 in the core packages by Foxy launch.
        • After Foxy launch there is also follow up work planned to complete remaining work for the ROS core packages to achieve Quality Level 1 ahead of G-Turtle launch
      • Blasdel to organize a followup meeting with interested parties to help spread usage throughout community:
        • Aaron Blasdel
        • Kyle Fazzari
        • Geoff Biggs
        • Joe Speed
    • [~15 mins][Pangercic] Performance and usability limitations in ROS 2
      • Present and discuss various reported issues with ROS 2 regarding performance and usability of the middleware.
      • Pangergic to organize follow-up meeting; Who’s interested?
        • Brian
        • Dirk
        • Geoff
        • Tom P.
        • Dejan / Kyle
        • Erik B / Joe
        • Alberto
        • Thomas Moulard
        • Aaron Blasdel
    • [~5min] [Knese] Hierarchy levels for PR reviewing
      • Overall goal: Speed up process of reviewing PRs for ros2 core packages
      • Similar idea to what the Linux kernel implements, having a WG doing a first pass of reviews and then hand-off to Open Robotics for final review.
      • As context, review the WG governance template.
      • General agreement that more efficient PR review is good, including involving more people in the process.
        • Knese to pursue the topic in a follow-up meeting (possibly the same one that Pangercic is organizing on performance and usability issues).
    • [Pangercic] Everyone please have a look the ROS 2 lectures by Kat Scott:
  • [45 min] Recurring business
    • Next ROS 2 distro release
    • Working groups [4 min each] (Note: these items were not discussed during the meeting due to lack of time.)
      • [Knese] Control
        • First set of PRs for boilerplate and design pattern are in flight
        • PAL to resume work on it with 1 FTE (ROSIN project) starting from June
        • Open Robotics to contribute with gazebo_ros_control pkgs
      • [Speed] Edge AI
      • [Martin Losa] Embedded
        • Micro-ROS Consortia Working in the release of Micro-ROS for Foxy
      • [Macenski] Navigation
        • A stray LinkedIn post turned viral, now I’m managing a Navigation2 Slack with 200+ members
        • In the last month, went from 3-5 at meetings to 21, working on 12 topics, with 40+ PRs merged, 30+ tickets closed, and 1 new reviewer. Broke 50 contributors this month and extremely close to a V1.0 release.
          • Working closely with many members of a robotics team, Project MANAS, in India that have been incredibly active.
        • A few examples of current sub-working-groups: GPS navigation, several new planners in development, V-SLAM support, semantic navigation, radar and dynamic obstacle support, and documentation. It’s great to be able to crack open my backlog R&D projects list and mentor folks through them!
        • Steadily increasing coverage, currently at 65%. There’s a testing sub-working-group forming to create large high-quality realistic simulations of a robotics application to stress test. We’re more concerned with practical production coverage than the line coverage - but goal of 75% by EOY.
      • [Pangercic] Real-time
      • [Biggs] Safety
        • It lives!
        • The safety working group has seen a revival thanks to some new participants with the essential combination of a topic, the enthusiasm for that topic, and the time to execute it.
        • Our meetings are back on, twice a month.
        • We are now working on creating or adopting (and contributing to) a simple open-source requirements tracing tool to allow some basic requirements tracing in open source projects.
        • We still plan on doing the safety patterns catalogue, but are still resource constrained. However the outlook is positive for this.
      • [Fazzari] Security
        • Vuln Disclosure policy proposed as REP 2006. Continuing to work on follow-on activities which support the policy.
        • Working through issues with Foxy support and failing tests
        • Demo’d a POC for “ros2 launch --secure” that uses NoDL to dynamically create secure nodes.
      • [Blasdel] Tooling
        • Github Actions added Focal support
        • Planning out some ROSbag QA tasks for Foxy release
        • Cross Compile added a few small features to support Springer book chapter use case
4 Likes
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I am really interested in this WG from Sony, so if it takes place, i would like to participate.

2 Likes
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I’m interested. I also have a couple other work associates who would like to join. I can give their details in a DM.