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ROS 2 TSC Meeting Minutes for 2021-08-19


ROS2TSCContributionReport-2021-08-19.pdf (114.5 KB)


Note from Kat: I am going to start including meeting action items for TSC members. Be aware some of the links below may not be available for general ROS Discourse users.


  • Action Items for TSC Members:

  • Attendees

    • Andrei Kholodnyi, Wind River
    • Karsten Knese, Bosch
    • Lyle Johnson, Apex.AI
    • Lou Amadio, Microsoft
    • Chris Lalancette, Tully Foote, Kat Scott, Geoff Biggs, William Woodall, Louise Poubel, Open Robotics
    • Aaron Blasdel, Emerson Knapp - Amazon
    • Dave Coleman, PickNik Robotics
    • Alberto Soragna, Mauro Passerino, Brian Wilcox, Orjeta Taka - iRobot
    • Jeremie Deray (artivis), Canonical
    • Will Son, ROBOTIS
    • Steve Macenski, Samsung Research
    • Lokesh Kumar Goel/Herb Kuta, LG Electronics
    • Nick Fragale, Rover Robotics
    • Tomoya Fujita, Sony
    • Joe Speed, ADLINK

  • Preliminaries

    • [Kat][1 min] Please remember to fill out your contribution report at the bottom of this document prior to the meeting.
    • [Kat][1 min] Community Rep Process Starts in ~3 weeks.
    • [Alberto Soragna / iRobot] Change of representative.
    • [Lokesh / LG] Change of representative to Herb Kuta

  • Old business

  • New business

    • [Joe Speed / Matt Robinson] Motion to add ROS Industrial to ROS TSC
    • [Karsten][10 min] – Update on ROS at Bosch
    • [Alberto iRobot][10min]
      • Slides are here.
      • [Confidential Discussion]
      • Discussion on the review process for the open source contributions and potential for improvements of this process.
      • Proposal and discussion to add performance improvements as roadmap items to releases with gating metrics and tools.

  • Recurring business

    • Next ROS 2 distro release
    • Working groups [<=5 mins each]

      • [Knese] Control

        • Branching strategy for ros2_control* packages.
          • A few more minor bugs into Foxy
          • Branch off for Foxy & Galactic
          • Use master as rolling dev
        • More lifecycle usage, not only in controllers but in their respective hardware interfaces as well
        • Expose non-trivial, non-double interfaces from hardware

      • [Speed] Edge AI

        • On hiatus because racecar. It turns out that building ten $1M ROS 2 IAC robots and supporting all the universities with IAC base vehicle software is hard.
        • HW Acceleration WG covers the same ground so go with that.

      • [Martin Losa] Embedded

      • [Coleman] Manipulation

        • Meeting notes
        • Rolling release is done!
        • Hybrid Planning proceeding, Fraunhofer Welding Demo
        • Getting OMPL Orientation Constraints completed
        • Windows Port finished, discussing new Windows Maintainer
        • Separate MoveIt 2 Foxy branch to fix deprecation warnings in Rolling

      • [Woodall] Middleware

        • Meeting notes and agenda:
        • Discussion about communicating message definitions “on-the-wire” at runtime for use in tools.
        • Discussion about future improvements to the intra-process system in ROS 2, about doing it in rclcpp vs through the middleware.
        • Discussion about how to handle which network interfaces are used by the middleware, especially in the case of interfaces that may come up after a ROS application is running.

      • [Macenski] Navigation

        • Ongoing work in the Summer Program
          • Largely driven to completion making each server have a single node and use best practices with additional executors with William’s help
          • Assisted Teleop POC still in development
          • Safety nodes POC still in development
        • Starting to prototype a “nav2_composition” package to have a single process Nav2 bringup option to reduce network overhead and latencies (hopefully help with embedded applications)
        • Fixed longer term issues regarding high CPU loads in the servers on occasion. Root cause was TF2 message filters needing a timeout or the backlog of messages build up – Thanks Wyca Robotics.
        • Contributor helping out with thread sanitation fixing the few issues that existed
        • Launch separation of robot models from the environment so its easier to spawn different custom robots and/or different custom environments
        • Documentation added to first time setup guide for basic sensor setup / costmap / amcl / slamtoolbox
        • A set of TF PRs to support ongoing to work it would be great to have sped up since time constrained summer student projects depend on it.

      • [Andrei] Real-time

      • [Biggs] Rust

      • [Biggs] Safety

        • On hold

      • [Deray] Security

        • ROS2 DDS Security PKCS#11 URI support design doc (PR#319)
        • Brief ‘summer-ish’ meeting as most people are either on vacation or going to. Shaun Murphy from Canonical has introduced himself as current chairman and reassured of canonical commitment. General discussion

      • [Knapp & Blasdel] Tooling

        • Rosbag2 features in review
          • Adding use_sim_time playback timing - requires rclcpp Clock::sleep_until for ROS Time
          • Adding random-seek interface for storage, to be able to jump arbitrarily forward and backward
          • API tutorials and sample code for Foxy
          • Snapshot-recording - don’t write continuously, only write buffer to disk on a trigger
        • Rosbag2 bag(s)->bag(s) “converter”/”rewriter” in implementation
        • Continuing usability enhancements in action-ros-ci/setup-ros
        • Community contributor has picked up true cross compile upgrade for ros-cross-compile tool

      • [Knapp] WebTools

        • Great attendance!
        • Working towards a release of rosbridge suite for Foxy/Galactic/Rolling
        • Ongoing high level discussion: implementation technology for robot-side rosbridge client - considering C++ vs Python vs NodeJS websocket implementations, how to integrate WebRTC
        • In tandem with MiddleWare WG - started design discussion on “Message Definitions over-the-wire” for visualization tools and recorders (Message definitions at runtime ("on-the-wire") · Issue #1159 · ros2/ros2 · GitHub)
        • FYI about Foxglove’s native javascript/typescript implementations of ros2 and rosbag2 (no rcl dependency for use in-browser or on remote computers with no local ros environment)
        • foxglove studio now fully supports both ros 2 bags and live via rosbridge (web build hosted at studio.foxglove.dev)
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@Katherine_Scott or @joespeed could you please elaborate on the meaning of this?

I created a table a while ago while announcing the HAWG comparing it to other WGs, so that the value was clear. I was advised not to disclose it at the time, but I keep it handy to ensure we continue adding value to the community. Here’re some of those bits that concern the Edge AI WG (collected from its official documentation):

WG Goal Differences Avenues for cooperation (aka intersection)
Hardware Acceleration drive creation, maintenance and testing of acceleration kernels on top of open standards (OpenCL) for optimized ROS 2 and Gazebo interactions over different compute substrates (FPGAs, GPUs and ASICs).
Edge AI make Edge AI easier and ubiquitous in ROS 2, specifically ML applied to navigation, perception & picking, inspection and motion planning. Acceleration doesn’t focus particularly on AI nor on the more generic ML. Also, Acceleration doesn’t limit itself to edge and considers also workstations, data centers or cloud amongst the mediums. AI-powered algorithms across use cases may benefit from acceleration through specialized compute architectures including DPUs.
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Hi @vmayoral, that is a very nice summary of WG responsibilities. As a practical matter the Edge AI WG is parked until after the Indy Autonomous Challenge race Oct 23rd because I and much of our team here are consumed by IAC and something else. While the mission of the two WGs is not identical, there is some common ground so we’ll defer to you for the near term (or longer).

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Hey @joespeed,

Got it, thanks for sharing and :+1: for IAC. Besides a fun project, we are getting some nice dissemination there for ROS 2. Keep it up!

Edge AI-wise, folks in that group are welcome to join us indeed at the Hardware Acceleration WG. There’s no real overlap today AFAIK, but I certainly would love to see how acceleration can speed up inference at the edge while using ROS 2.
If there’s anyone working in this direction, I’m interested!

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