ROS 2 TSC Meeting Minutes: 2021-07-15

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ROS 2 TSC Meeting Minutes 2021-07-15

ROS 2 TSC Contribution Report - 2021-07-15.pdf (168.4 KB)

  • Attendees

    • Microsoft - Lou Amadio
    • Bosch - Karsten Knese
    • Open Robotics - Chris Lalancette, Kat Scott, Geoff Biggs, Brian Gerkey, Louise Poubel, Tully Foote, William Woodall
    • Samsung Research - Steve Macenski
    • Rover Robotics - Nick Fragale, Davis Fay
    • ROBOTIS - Will Son
    • eProsima - Jaime Martin Losa
    • PickNik - Dave Coleman, David Lu!!
    • ADLINK - Joe Speed
    • Intel - Harold Yang
    • Amazon - Aaron Blasdel, Emerson Knapp
    • Toyota Research Institute - Ian McMahon
    • SwRI (representing GVSC) - Jerry Towler
    • LG Electronics - Brian Shin
    • Apex.AI - Lyle Johnson
    • Sony - Tomoya Fujita
    • iRobot - Ori Taka
    • iRobot - Alberto Soragna

  • Preliminaries [5 mins]

    • [Kat][1 min] Please remember to fill out your contribution report at the bottom of this document prior to the meeting.
    • Feel free to help with notes.
    • [Kat][1 min]
      • Brian will be handing off Chairing the meeting to Kat

  • Old business [10 mins]

  • New business [35 mins]

    • Dave Coleman[15 Min] – Reflections after 1 year on TSC: how can we tackle more substantive issues with ROS 2?
      • TSC was a good move, ROS 2 is good.
      • TSC discussion is different from PickNik users.
      • Time spent for governance is too much.
      • Too many inconsequential updates (competitions, features, company specific, university teams)
      • Are there enough ROS 2 drivers? – also param servers, launch files, RVIZ, merge delays.
      • how do we focus on core software development? Make it possible to bring things up and find solutions w/o the standard response to suggest the person raising the issues fix it themselves.
      • ROS as a product, working on community health, leveraging the community, are all good alternatives
      • ChrisL – Roadmap for G was hard ⇒ Roadmap for H is going to be bottom up.
      • JoeSpeed – discussion of doing one executor well versus lots of diff executors as example
      • Dave – should be able to do core merge. Easier access to core ROS repos.
      • Chris L: Reviewers / maintainers are the bottle necks. We have added a few, but we need more core maintainers & reviewers.
      • Brian – we tried to recruit maintainers a few years ago, it didn’t go well.
      • Kat – Could we consider reviews and maintain/contribute count to TSC?
      • Aaron – Who is the customer of ROS 2 and what do they need/want?
      • Karsten documentation and DDS config is still not there yet. What is the product of ROS 2?
      • Discourse discussion
    • Nick Fragale [5 Min] – Talk about our new product, the Rover Mini, launching on kickstarter and Sept 1st, $449 super early bird special. Shipping with ROS 2 by default.
      • Would like to drive adoption to ROS 2.
      • Driving adoption does not count towards tsc contribution.
      • New robot drops in 15 days.
      • We plan to use this robot to teach ROS 2 and drive adoption.
      • Would like feedback for the community
      • Compute is Jetson Nano 4Gb – maybe Oak-D
    • Lou Amadio[10 Min] – Demo The Visual Studio Code ROS extension’s ROS2 specific features, including launch debugging, and ROS2 health monitoring.
      Asks from the TSC:
      • Feature Requests
      • Feedback on bugs
      • Discuss Roadmap

  • Recurring business

    • [clalancette] Next ROS 2 distro release
      • New core maintainers
      • Humble roadmap
        • Open Robotics theme is “Developer Experience”
        • Preliminary roadmap is next weekish.
        • Concerns / requests should be e-mailed to Chris L.
      • Humble timeline
        • Timeline is similar to Galactic
        • Requests need to be within the next few weeks
        • RMW Freeze moves up two weeks earlier
        • Freeze ROS Base vs ROS Core (ROSBase is a superset of core)
      • Default RMW selection
        • It is that time of the year.
        • Vote: first week of November.
        • October TSC Meeting Topic
        • Data done by early October.
        • Chris will send a doc with a more complete outline.
        • Miscellaneous pedantry around provider / contributor and RMW and DDS.
        • What’s in the report
          • Chris will create a “template” and providers will provide information about this.
          • TSC members should make their suggestions ASAP.
          • “RMW Providers” will also give their thoughts.
          • Lou: can we have different RMW for diff OSs – Chris: Would prefer that this is not the case.

  • Working groups [<=5 mins each]

    • [Knese] Control

      • More development towards robot demo
        • Joint limits implementation / revisiting existing ROS1 joint limits implementation
        • Non-trivial (non double) state and command interfaces, e.g. export CV_MAT pointer or complex data type in hardware implementation

    • [Speed] Edge AI

    • [Martin Losa] Embedded

    • [Coleman] Manipulation

      • MoveIt 2.2 released!
        • A full sync with MoveIt 1 (#505)
        • Use MoveItCpp as MoveGroup context, multi planning pipeline support (moveit#2127)
      • Enabled Bullet collision detection (#473)
      • Galactic and Rolling Support, enable CI (#494)
      • Lots of improvements to ros2_control to enable MoveIt integration with hardware
      • Feature comparison table released between MoveIt 1 and 2

    • [Woodall] Middleware

      • Few meetings since the last TSC meeting.
      • Bumped progress on pull requests for:
      • rmw callback APIs (event executor related)
      • content filtered topics
      • WaitForAcknowledgements rmw API
      • fyi Alberto & Erik met today re progressing the multithreaded executor support in rmw_cyclonedds. Seems should be able to get to a fix soon (for unblocking RMW listener APIs)

    • [Macenski] Navigation

      • Still patching up tests that broke from the galactic release
      • New python commander library with POC examples provided
      • CI system updated to use Rolling rather than master builds, developer guides and workflows to be updated accordingly
      • Steve is mentoring 3 students this summer
        • Zhenpeng: working on reducing the number of nodes in Nav2 and instead replacing with best use of multithreaded executors and callback groups
        • Saurabh: working on some basic safety features for nav2 commonly developed by OEMs
        • Anushree: working on assisted teleop capabilities
      • Regulated Pure Pursuit controller now can handle faster velocities and support reversing
      • Galactic synced to receive Hybrid-A* optimizations that were completed last month

    • [Johnson] Real-time

      • Preparing for the real-time workshop at ROS conference
        • Had a meeting last week between Apex.AI, Bosch and Win River, review the agenda and discuss a HW selection
      • Next call planned for the next week
      • fyi ADLINK IT is setting up network for hosting RT WG remotely accessible systems. Sorry so slow.

    • [Biggs] Rust

    • [Biggs] Safety

      • Considering shutting down this working group.
      • Although the two invited talks held so far have been well attended relative to previous WG meetings, the response to invitations to talk has been less than required to maintain a series of talks.
      • KAT – probably need a guide for working groups that are languishing.

    • [Deray] Security

    • [Blasdel/Knapp] Tooling

      • Minutes
      • rosbag2 Foxy-compatible foxy-future branch has been finalized, users can build it from source in their workspace. Details in the README as well as on the foxy branch.
      • Discussing whether it is worthwhile to enable clang-tidy on rosbag2 for static analysis. It’s very noisy, but has some high-value checks.
      • Researching use of ros2doc to generate documentation for rosbag2, no progress yet but excited to continue
      • Priority work: reducing flaky tests, increasing test stability
      • Ongoing work: arbitrary jump/seek during read
      • Hot topic: storing message definitions in rosbag2 (overlap with WebTools WG discussion, also a hot topic there). Bringing up at next Middleware WG meeting, and will open a ticket for discussion before then (if it doesn’t already exist)
      • In planning: bag reshaping - take as input one or more bags with any read configuration, and write back out as one or more bags using any write configuration. Will allow for merge, split, conversion between storage compression serialization formats

    • [Knapp] WebTools

      • Minutes
      • Had second and third meetings, have chosen a recurring semiweekly time
      • Presentations:
        • Foxglove.dev - Electron/browser-based visualizer suite, fully open-source fork of WebViz project started by former Cruise team
        • Rover Mini - Rover robotics interested in web-tech frontend for controlling new robot, want to apply it to their freshly-announced Mini robot
        • Dheera Venkatraman - ROSboard - lightweight Jquery-based browser visualizer. And ROSShow: terminal-based ROS visualizer. Can view camera output as colored Unicode blocks in the terminal!! Wild stuff.
      • Hot topic: rosbag2 storage formats for easier browser-based parsing
      • Hot topic: ROS 2 message definitions on the wire. To subscribe to arbitrary topics without having to “build it in” to web frontend. To use for plotting and message contents display. Applies to rosbag2 parsing as well.
      • No concrete roadmap yet decided - but based on attendance and interest, may be focusing on unblocking and “standardizing”/“commonizing” features of Foxglove Studio as a web-tech RViz alternative
1 Like
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Could we get https://github.com/ros2/ros2_documentation/pull/1662 reviewed by someone with merge privileges? There’s valuable content in there for newcomers to security.

3

I added it to my queue for today. I’ll take a look.

1 Like
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