ROS 2 TSC Meeting Minutes: 2020-06-18

General
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ROS 2 TSC Meeting Agenda 2020-06-18

  • Attendees
    • Brian Gerkey, Tully Foote, Louise Poubel, Dirk Thomas, Open Robotics
    • Geoffrey Biggs, Tier IV
    • Joe Speed, ADLINK
    • Aaron Blasdel, AWS Robomaker
    • Steve Macenski, Samsung Research
    • Kyle Fazzari, Canonical
    • Will Son, ROBOTIS
    • Dave Colman, PickNik
    • Karsten Knese, Bosch
    • Jaime Martin Losa, eProsima
    • Dejan Pangercic, Apex.AI
    • Sean Yen, Microsoft
    • Nick Fragale, Rover Robotics
    • Jerry Towler, SwRI (representing GVSC)
    • Toffee Albina, Toyota Research Institute
    • Lokesh Kumar Goel, LG Electronics
  • Preliminaries
    • [5 mins][Gerkey] Welcome to new TSC members.
  • Old business
    • [5 mins][Gerkey] Present and discuss proposed format for self-reporting on member contributions (said proposal to be shared in advance of the meeting).
      • Proposal:
        • In advance each monthly TSC meeting, each TSC member representative reports on their organization’s contributions (which may be done via the organization’s employees or contractors) from the prior month in that meeting’s agenda.
          • We will revisit and may reduce the frequency of reporting over time.
        • The report format will be:
          • organization name : representative name
          • Level of effort: # FTE or # person-hours contributed in the previous quarter
          • Contributions (each package should be listed here):
            • foo_org/bar_pkg: concise description of what was done> <link, if applicable
            • bat_org/baz_pkg: concise description of what was done> <link, if applicable
            • …
        • This list of reports will be included with the published minutes following the meeting.
        • We do not discuss the contributions in the meeting, but TSC members are encouraged to check each other’s work and discuss potential issues directly with each other.
        • We start this process with our 2020 July meeting by reporting on contributions from 2020 June.
    • [10 mins][Pangercic] Present and discuss results from focused meeting on performance and usability concerns in ROS 2.
      • Gerkey is assembling a taxonomy of reported issues. In parallel Ingo Luetkebohle is assembling a taxonomy of use-cases.
      • A follow-up meeting will synthesize the results and prioritize strategies for mitigating the problems, to be shared publicly.
    • [5 minutes][Biggs] Results of vote on community representatives and next steps
      • Result: the motion passed.
      • Biggs to follow up on executing the process of adding community representatives.
    • [2 minutes][Aaron] Brief update on Quality Levels Breakout meeting
      • Need to push for adoption in TSC and the general ROS community.
      • Many of those trying to bring their Quality Level up have run into a roadblock when their dependencies are not of sufficient quality and they have minimal control to move that forward.
        • General consensus that we need to push for quality at the lowest levels first
      • Areas of assistance were identified:
        • Templates
        • Tutorials
        • Automation
      • Action items from the meeting
        • William is writing a document on automation efforts and tooling around quality levels
        • Kyle, Aaron & Steve - Will follow up on reporting the level of effort to develop a “How to get to quality level X” set of tutorials.
      • AI - Aaron To create a document to gather deps that TSC members are having issues with when they are moving up the Quality Level tree.
      • AI - Aaron & Louise will put together a “summary of Quality Levels on the dependencies of rclcpp”.
  • New business
    • [3 mins][Gerkey & Macenski] Consider changes to voting procedures:
      • For example:
        • Should we explicitly offer “abstain” as an option in votes?
        • How should abstentions (explicit or implicit) be treated?
        • Should there be a minimum participation threshold (effectively a quorum) for a vote to be valid?
        • Should “majority” mean: (a) majority of votes cast by members, (b) majority of members present for a vote; or © majority of membership? We currently use (a).
        • What if there’s a tie?
      • If you’re interested in a subgroup discussion on this topic, add your name here:
        • Gerkey
        • Macenski
        • Blasdel
    • [3 mins][Thomas] Open Robotics is spending time on the various warnings and test failures across the CI.
      • The goal is to have them turn over green by the end of July.
      • Progress is tracked in https://github.com/orgs/ros2/projects/22
      • Once that goal is reached we aim to be more strict when accepting PRs as well as rollback merged changes if they show regressions.
    • [5 mins][Thomas] Choco packages for nightly builds of ROS 2 variants
      • https://github.com/ros2/ros2_documentation/pull/506
      • MS generates them matching the support timeline of active ROS 2 distros
      • Should released versions also be provided to match Debian binary packages?
        • Will be discussed in a separate meeting tomorrow with Microsoft.
    • [1 minute][Steve]
    • [1 minute][Lokesh]
    • [1 minute][Gerkey]
      • ROSCon 2020 -> 2021
  • Recurring business
    • [10 mins][Thomas] Next ROS 2 distro release
      • Hooray for Foxy!:fox_face::turtle:
      • Status on Rolling Ridley
      • Update (if any) on Galactic
        • Meta ticket to be created.
    • [30 mins] Working groups [<=3 mins each]
      • [Knese] Control
        • Constant group of participants (6-10). People from Bosch, KIT, LAAS-CRNS, Open Robotics, PAL-Robotics, etc.
        • Good work on design documents collected at https://github.com/ros-controls/roadmap/tree/master/design_drafts
        • First set of PRs are in flight. Work shared and done in parallel between basic core framework and individual controllers.
      • [Speed] Edge AI
      • [Martin Losa] Embedded
        • Releasing Foxy support for Micro-ROS
      • [Macenski] Navigation
        • Foxy release of navigation2 forthcoming
        • Ported ORB-SLAM2 to ROS2
        • Started Grid Maps port to ROS2 (20%)
          • Basis for new environmental model to replace costmap_2d
        • Theta* and Hybrid-A* planners in development
        • Semantic navigation standard continues to be in development
        • Working on adding preempt results to rclcpp_actions that are necessary for navigation and multiple other users (Moveit 2?)
      • [Pangercic] Real-time
      • [Biggs] Safety
      • [Fazzari] Security
        • Still working through Foxy security test failures (lots of connext openssl issues)
        • Working on vulnerability handling process to accompany VDP
        • Completed dependency trace for quality levels for SROS2 utilities
        • Bugfix backporting to Eloquent and Dashing for SROS2 utilities
        • NoDL release in Foxy
        • Check non-public packages in ament_pep257
        • SRUing patch to get libceres in Focal for arm64 (not strictly security-related, but important for ROS)
        • [Joe] please get Win10 onto openssl 1.1.1 like ubuntu
      • [Blasdel] Tooling
        • Since last TSC meeting, focused on software QA for Foxy, little new feature work, mostly bug fixes and infrastructure improvements
        • GitHub Action CI now supports Foxy
        • Next meeting will be reassessing the focus of the WG and determining vision towards next ROS 2 release
      • [Coleman] Manipulation
        • Completed sync of MoveIt 1 / MoveIt 2, very large and getting harder to maintain. MoveIt 1 still primary development location
        • move_group2 PR in progress - top level interface to MoveIt
        • 2 GSoC students, 1 intern working on MoveIt this summer
        • Releasing MoveIt dependencies into Foxy
        • Feature freeze for Foxy release, release start of July
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