ROS 2 TSC Meeting Minutes 2022-06-16

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ROS 2 TSC Contribution Report 2022-06-16.pdf (157.8 KB)

ROS 2 TSC Meeting Minutes 2022-06-16

  • Attendees

    • Andrei Kholodnyi - Wind River
    • Jaime Martin Losa - eProsima
    • Kat Scott, Chris Lalancette, Sumedh Koppula, Audrow Nash, Louise Poubel, Tully Foote, Geoff Biggs - Open Robotics
    • Lyle Johnson, Michael Orlov - Apex.AI
    • Tomoya Fujita - Sony
    • Steve Macenski - Samsung Research
    • Ralph Lange - Bosch
    • Henning Kayser - PickNik Robotics
    • Jeremie Deray (artivis) | Canonical
    • Olivier Michel - Community Rep
    • Will Son - ROBOTIS
    • Ian McMahon - Toyota Research Institute
    • Camilo Buscaron, Aaron Blasdel - Amazon
    • Matt Robinson - ROS-I (SwRI)
    • Jerry Towler - SwRI (representing GVSC)
    • Lou Amadio - Microsoft
    • Adrian Macneil - Foxglove
    • Alberto Soragna - iRobot

  • 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] I-Turtle Name
    • [Kat][1 min] ROSCon Registration Open
    • [Kat|1 min] Welcome Camilo – New AWS Rep

  • Old business

    • [Kat | 5 min] Humble Release Debrief
    • Update on Tooling Working Group
      • Preliminary idea to merge tooling and web working group.
      • Alternative (Tooling – ROS Bag group, CI Group, web working group)
      • Does tooling include CI?
      • Existing efforts at ROS Industrial for CI
      • Discuss offline

  • New business

    • [Ken/Jeff | 25 min] FogROS 2– Jeff Ichnowski / Ken Goldberg – UC Berkeley
    • [Chris Lalancette| 20 min] Default RMW selection process for I - Turtle
      • Prior Reports
      • Lou: Switching is a credibility issue (Ian agrees)
      • Lyle: It is really easy to switch
      • Adrian Macniel: what are the criteria for the default? Is it ease of use.
      • Chris: This is a longer conversation – small group conversation.
      • Bence: Open Robotics lays out framework for Self evaluation (e.g. Zenoh eval by Geoff)
      • Andrei – move to LTS?
      • Steve reduce scope to what users want.
      • Ian vendor self reporting with strict requirements.
    • [Kat / Sumedh | 15 min] Humble Documentation
      • Slides
      • Topic Areas that Need Improvement
      • [Steve’s notes] Documentation and Regularity
        • How can we work on improved documentation?
        • Prioritize searchability, sorting, and organization of existing pages
        • Regular (annual with release) auditing of existing documentation for API or best practices changes
        • Identifying missing documentation to be added and keep a list for contributors to help
        • Process for major changes to be discussed due to the large QoL impacts it has on developers
      • Who has the funding / time to be a dedicated docs reviewer

  • Recurring business

    • Next ROS 2 distro release

      • Starting planning now
        • Looking to do a shorter release, ~6 weeks
        • Slightly riskier, more chance of slip, but this is a non-LTS
        • Thoughts?
      • Roadmap process
        • EMAIL CHRIS FEATURES FOR IRON

    • Working groups [<=5 mins each]

      • [Bence] Control

        • Chainable controllers functionality almost landed
          • 1 PR missing (non-API-breaking)
        • Our github org has taken ownership of gazebo_ros2_control and ign_ros2_control
        • New satellite package forming: kinematics_interface
        • Started planning
          • Emergency stop handlers
          • ros2_control paper
          • ros2_control workshop
          • ros2_ control ROSCon talk

      • [Angelo Corsaro] Edge AI

      • [Martin Losa] Embedded

        • Complete Notes from the last meeting (2022.05.24) here
        • Agenda:
          • Building robots one bolt at a time - test driven development of micro-ROS with Renode
            • Presentation by Piotr Zierhoffer from Antmicro
          • Watch the demo: Turtlebot3 ROS based Robot Body Controller using RA6M5 (JP177 Winning Combination)
            • By Yuuki Okamiya and Kayoko Nemoto from Renesas Japan
            • Learn about latest micro-ROS enhancements
            • RCLC Parameter refactor
            • Hard liveness check

  • [Kayser] Manipulation

    • Successful Humble release, transition from Rolling was very smooth
      • there is a new stable ‘humble’ branch, ‘main’ supports Rolling and Humble moving forward
    • MSA Feature Complete - last remaining feature just added: ros2_control support
    • WMD 2022 - 28 PRs created, 33 merged, 15 issues closed
      • Improved tutorials and documentation
      • Completed OMPL orientation constraints feature
      • hadolint for dockerfiles
      • Usage of CallbackGroups instead of private nodes
    • GSoC projects started:
      • Python bindings for MoveIt 2 #1279
      • Simultaneous Trajectory Execution #3156

  • [Woodall] Middleware

  • [Macenski] Navigation

  • [Andrei] Real-Time

  • [Biggs] Client libraries

    • Rust client library is proceeding very well
    • Action servers do not monitor the liveliness of clients, e.g. to cancel goals no longer required because the requesting client is gone. Considering adding something to the design to handle this case.
    • Some discussion around error handling and the ability for a remote application to trigger a fatal exception in rclcpp.
    • We don’t have clear documentation on the list of exceptions that ROS code can throw.
    • Plan to take Nav2’s simple action server and make it more widely available, and do it at the rcl level.
    • Tracetools is a core dependency but it lives on gitlab. Is this a good idea?
    • Roadmap wishlist for Iron Irwini
      • Revision of the life cycle for life cycle nodes
      • Functional parity between rclpy and rclcpp
      • Remove callback groups from rclpy
    • WG meetings can’t be started by all WG organisers → Is this a permissions problem?

  • [Biggs] Safety

    • No updates this month

  • [Deray] Security

    • Meeting held on June 14th. Guest speaker André Santos presented the HAROS framework
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I can see the following in the Documentation topic areas which caught my interest and which seems reasonably high priority:

  1. Jetson Nano/ TX (Nvidia): All about better understanding Hardware acceleration
    A. How Hardware accelerated ROS 2 pipelines for humble work? - ROS GEM packages
    a. B. Usage demos on NVIDIA Isaac Transport

Hardware acceleration is a broad topic wherein there’re many things that can’t be achieved solely by Jetson Nano/TX. Also, this seems very NVIDIA-centric since AFAIK NVIDIA Isaac Transport is one of the implementations of REP 2007 and REP 2009. Will other implementations be documented as well? What’s the plan and rationale in here and who’s driving this?

Proper documentation about hardware acceleration shouldn’t focus on an specific technology/accelerator, but cover the topic broadly, introduce the concepts properly differentiating between accelerators, and then work with silicon vendors and the community to commit resources so that they contribute documentation for each of their specializations. We’ve been trying to do this in the HAWG for more than a year now.

In alignment with REP 2008 PR, the HAWG has been pushing contributions in a vendor-neutral manner, which helps ROS developers use the best resource for each use case (e.g. GPUs for vector-friendly computation applications, FPGAs for I/O interaction, etc) and jump across accelerators to avoid lock in (e.g. to cope with the semiconductor scarcity). Shouldn’t the same approach be adopted by TSC-driven initiatives?

I think the HAWG should be involved in this effort and steer this.

For what concerns hardware acceleration docs, I can help reviewing documentation proposals but overall, sticking to only one vendor of hardware acceleration will provide such vendor a huge (if you ask me, unfair) competitive edge which will turn into a negative effect for the community mid-term. Mainly because this will a) discourage other silicon vendors to continue investing (or start doing so) into ROS 2, and b) defeat the purpose we’ve been trying for a year at the HAWG encouraging other vendors to participate (note we have usually 4-5 vendors attending HAWG meetings and increasingly showing interest).

At the HAWG, we’ve produced demonstrators and walkthroughs in the form of ticket/issues which could be transformed into ROS documentation as a starting point, keeping a vendor-neutral general scope.

As for funding/time, similar to the meta-ros Humble port which was funded by HAWG members[1] and which was tested in various accelerators [2], I can try and reach out the various silicon vendors which might be interested on this and see who’s willing to commit resources to contribute to documentation and work with us at the HAWG.

Of course, this only makes since if the TSC defers to the Hardware Acceleration WG for hardware acceleration documentation.

Can someone please clarify this and provide answers to the questions raised above?

  1. Reach out to AMD for resources to port Yocto recipes to Humble ROS 2 TSC Meeting January 20th, 2022 - #4 by vmayoral ↩︎

  2. Humble support in Yocto (Honister) and writeups for various accelerator solutions ROS 2 Humble Hawksbill Released! - #7 by vmayoral ↩︎

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Victor my intern Sumedh and I were reporting on the general trends we found by looking at the data from ROS Answers. These are topic areas where we get a lot of questions and the community would benefit from improved documentation, vendor neutral, vendor specific, or otherwise.

We are not passing judgement of what platform is better or worse or making a recommendation, we’re just reporting what we found.

Could you please ask for clarification / assume good faith before you jump into a tirade?

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@Katherine_Scott thanks for clarifying, it helps knowing this is just the result of a preliminary assessment. This wasn’t clear to me while reading the following (and I obviously wasn’t in the TSC meeting room):

That’s precisely what I did above, no conclusions on my end just yet:

Note though that your assessment is still confusing. Above you say you’ve reported on trends. Where’s the trend in here (taken from your report)?

  1. B. Usage demos on NVIDIA Isaac Transport

This is not even a released product, so of course there’s no match in answers.ros.org.

I’m sorry if the above reads harsh. It really isn’t my intention but frankly, I think the topic deserves proper context and discussion. Discussing and collecting community feedback is what this forum is for since its inception. Documentation is hard and hardware acceleration is not an easy topic. It’s my day job, so I was volunteering to help (and still do!) with some of my spare cycles.

Happy to help if you @Katherine_Scott and Sumedh can ping me while working on hardware acceleration docs but let’s please capture the ongoing discussion at the HAWG, collect feedback from its members and use the material generated (e.g. we launched a hardware acceleration acceleration survey a while ago successfully collecting about 100 entries of community participants and HAWG members, this should help prioritize what to document first).

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