ROS 2 TSC Meeting Minutes: 2021-06-17

General
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ROS 2 TSC Meeting Agenda 2021-06-17

ROS 2 TSC Contribution Report 2021-06-17.pdf (122.3 KB)

  • Attendees
    • Open Robotics - Chris Lalancette, Kat Scott, William Woodall, Louise Poubel, Tully Foote, Brian Gerkey
    • Toyota Research Institute - Ian McMahon
    • Apex.AI - Lyle Johnson
    • Rover Robotics - Nick Fragale
    • ROBOTIS - Will Son
    • LG Electronics - Lokesh Kumar Goel
    • Microsoft - Lou Amadio, Dan Rosenstein
    • iRobot - Alberto Soragna, Lenny Story, Mauro Passerino
    • Canonical - Jeremie Deray (artivis)
    • Southwest Research Institute, representing GVSC - Jerry Towler
    • AWS - Aaron Blasdel, Emerson Knapp
    • Sony - Tomoya Fujita
    • Wind River - Andrei Kholodnyi
    • PickNik - Dave Coleman
    • ADLINK - Joe Speed
  • Preliminaries [5 mins]
    • [Brian][1 min] Please remember to fill out your contribution report at the bottom of this document prior to the meeting.
    • [Brian][4 mins]
      • Brian will be handing off Chairing the meeting to Kat
      • Canonical Representative is changing to Jeremie Deray
  • Old business [10 mins]
    • Membership changes:
      • [Brian/Kat][5 mins] – Community representatives implementation update
      • [Jaime][5 mins] – Update on FTE enforcement in charter amendment
        • Add 1 FTE enforcement policy by JaimeMartin · Pull Request #1685 · ros2/ros2_documentation · GitHub
        • Questions about how to evaluate 1 FTE.
          • It’s important to several members to allow variations in the intensity over the duration of the evaluation period.
          • Current approach: REP-2005.
          • We will discuss potential solutions and vote on the final implementation.
          • How do we select the scope of the evaluation committee?
          • Alexi – how to WG contribute to this number?
          • Lokesh – roadmap contribution seems too specific. What happens if someone doesn’t “complete” a task. “Complete” may not be specific enough
          • Chris – Roadmap is easy to update. Just describe what you want to do.
          • Brian – Please comment on PR in the next two weeks. Contact Kat/Brian when done.
        • Related updated from Autoware Foundation: The Autoware Foundation - FTE FAQ For Member Companies - Google Docs
      • [Joe] – Update on new applicant evaluation process
        • Tabled until next time
        • But important to do soon because we have at least one pending applicant
        • Not ready yet.
        • Please reach out to Kat / Brian when done.
  • New business [35 mins]
  • Recurring business [<= 40 mins]
    • [Chris][10 mins] Next ROS 2 distro release
      • Galactic
      • Humble roadmap in progress
        • Different roadmap this time
        • Open Robotics contributions will have a “theme” (still TBD)
        • To begin with, the roadmap will only have items that Open Robotics will work on
        • TSC members expected to add to roadmap as part of FTE commitment
        • Kat will post recent stats.
    • Working groups [<=5 mins each]
      • [Knese] Control
        • Redesign and work done for proper ros2_control_demos repository - including documentation
        • Current work for a Franka Panda robot demo in simulation as well as real robot with group effort controllers and admittance controllers.
        • New release for rolling and galactic (to unblock Moveit)
        • Ros2_control talk scheduled for the Construct’s “ROS Developer’s day” on Saturday, ros2_control considered for hands-on session during a ROSCon workshop.
      • [Speed] Edge AI
        • No new meetings
      • [Martin Losa] Embedded
        • micro-ROS Galactic release: post
        • micro-ROS supports NuttX 10
        • Avoiding the 64 kB XRCE size limit in micro-ROS post
        • Parameter Server example
        • Multiserial agent post
        • Type introspection in micro-ROS
        • micro-ROS + Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect post
        • Presentation by Felipe Neves [Espresssif] 20’ + 10’ (Q&A): live code fashion “Creating your out-of-tree ESP32 microROS enabled application” (There is no recording)
      • [Coleman] Manipulation
        • Releases for Rolling and Galactic getting close (target date June 30th)
        • New Foxy release completed
        • Want main MoveIt2 branch to target Foxy, Galactic, and Rolling at the same time. Expect to fork off Foxy eventually.
        • Everything migrated to Github Actions
        • ROS 2 demos for UR and Hello Robot still underway
      • [Woodall] Middleware
        • No new meetings due to lack of agenda items.
        • Work continues (slowly) on pull requests that were started in the working group.
      • [Macenski] Navigation
        • Map viz updates look really nice! We’ll have a QT map editing tool merged in soon with community contributions
        • New Python commander API added in a PR looking for reviewers
        • New updates to the Hybrid-A* planner speeding it up 2-3x are pending reviews
        • ROS Dev Day talk on Nav2 new features on Saturday!
      • [Kholodnyi] Real-time
      • [Biggs] Rust
        • No updates this month.
      • [Biggs] Safety
        • The second monthly presentation was well-attended and well-received.
        • Writing safer code
          • A certification example from Apex.OS
          • This talk will give an overview about automotive software development and present the workflow and tools used at Apex.AI. Furthermore, a certification code example from Apex.OS will be discussed. The talk will conclude with the presentation of our efforts to open-source the apex::threading library.
        • Having trouble finding a speaker for the July presentation slot. A call for speakers has been put out and contacts have been contacted but no luck yet.
      • [Jeremie] Security
      • [Knapp] Tooling
      • [Knapp] WebTools
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In fact there was a couple of updates. @nikolaimorin is working on improving the integration of Cargo and colcon. I filed Create repository for colcon-ros-cargo · Issue #435 · colcon/colcon-core · GitHub so that we’d have a colcon-ros-cargo repo where we can work, but it hasn’t received a response yet.

I also filed Debian packages for non-core extensions · Issue #436 · colcon/colcon-core · GitHub because we’d like to start distributing the colcon-cargo and colcon-ros-cargo extensions, but not require users to use pip for that.

Additionally, cargo and rustc are now in rosdep, so they can be declared as dependencies in package.xml

However, I’ve seen in the previous TSC meeting minutes that Geoff is the one providing the updates, but I’m a bit confused about the rationale for that and I suggest it’d be good to ping the ROS2 Rust team before the TSC so we can give you a summary of the updates. Right now @nikolaimorin and I are doing the bulk of work, but more people are definitely welcome to join us.

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I’m providing them because @ruffsl, who is the leader of the WG, asked me to do so. I’ve no objection to someone else providing the updates.

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I went mostly offline half this year to wrap up my thesis. When members suggested in our matrix channel that we present rust-wg meeting minutes to the TSC, I replied asking if @gbiggs could represent us on our behalf while I defended my PhD (which I have btw! but am now busy relocating :houses: ), as he already attends both TSC and Rust WG meetings.

A good place to record and disseminate WG progress would be via our community repo. Looks like the last update were the notes I record from December. Also, anyone is welcome to summit PRs to add recent meeting minutes or status updates on ros related projects using rust:

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Here’s where the disconnect comes from. @ruffsl created the WG on his own (hence him being the leader), independently from the work being done in the ros2-rust organization. I’m quite confused wih this parallel organization, to be honest. In fact, I remember you scheduling a meeting a while ago (Rust working group meeting - 2021/04/28), so I don’t know how that happened, because I’m not even a member of https://groups.google.com/g/ros-rust-working-group-invites

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When inquiring about the community’s interest in starting a ROS working group for Rust, I do recall direct messaging authors of the ROS2 rust client library (both yourself and @lelongg) via discourse (professional email addresses unknown to me) the same day October last year, asking whether you all would prefer leading such a WG.

Proposal: Rust Working Group for ROS

While I did receive a response from @lelongg declining any lead role, citing lost personal time to invest on projects, I interpreted @esteve 's non-response as a decline for similar reasons. Of the responses I did receive about the proposal, only @gbiggs responded with a willingness to commit a fixed number of hours per week to help organize the WG, thus I elicited his help in forming the WG and clearing it with Open Robotics.

To be clear, that invite has never expired, as I’m more than grateful if you or other members would like to take the lead, coordinate WG meeting schedules, agendas, minutes, etc. I merely volunteered for these secretarial tasks as no one else seemed to be available to take the initiative at the time; though currently I am not sponsored to contribute to any FOSS projects.

My only request would be that we do not limit the agenda of the rust WG to only middleware, and remain inclusive with our time and discussions for rust related robotics application software as well, like perception pipelines or navigation libraries using rust. The latter being what personally motivated myself in starting a rust WG, and what I’ve been working on with my spare dev time.

All working group calendar invite lists and events are public, and are open for anyone to subscribe to. Although I can add you as an admin to manage event’s if you’d prefer. With my move from my alma mater, I’ll no longer have EDU access to a pro-business G-Suite, so we’ll likely need someone else to create/host/record our Google Meet sessions so they can be uploaded for community members from conflicting timezones.

5 Likes