ROS 2 TSC Meeting Minutes 2022-3-17

General
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ROS 2 TSC Meeting Minutes 2022-3-17

Contribution Report:

ROS 2 TSC Contribution Report 2022-03-17.pdf (136.8 KB)

  • Attendees

    • Open Robotics - Chris Lalancette, Kat Scott, William Woodall, Geoff Biggs, Brandon Ong, Audrow Nash, Louise Poubel, Tully Foote
    • Andrei Kholodnyi, Wind River
    • Adrian Macneil, Foxglove
    • Olivier Michel, Community Representative
    • Will Son, ROBOTIS
    • Ian McMahon, Toyota Research Institute
    • Tomoya Fujita, Sony
    • Alberto Soragna, iRobot
    • Steve Macenski - Samsung Research
    • Aaron Blasdel, Emerson Knapp, Camilo Buscaron - AWS
    • Lyle Johnson, Apex.AI
    • Jeremie Deray (artivis) | Canonical
    • Henning Kayser - PickNik
    • Jerry Towler - SwRI, representing GVSC
    • Patrick Musau, Community Representative
    • Chen Bainian, Ramu Uma ROS-Industrial
    • Stuart Schaefer - Microsoft Corp

  • Preliminaries

  • Old business

  • New business

  • Recurring business

    • Next ROS 2 distro release
      • Humble release
        • Have been blocked on getting binary packages running on Rolling for 2 weeks → need rebuild of pyside2, requesting today
          • What’s the escalation path we should use for other problems we find in Jammy?
        • Humble RMW freeze date is Monday, March 21
        • Overall feature freeze is Monday, April 4
      • Roadmap items
        • Open Robotics
          • System-level network debugging tool - done, in GitHub - ros2/ros_network_viz
          • Python API support to rosdoc2 - not going to make it, far more complex than we thought
          • C++ API documentation - Mostly done, just waiting on configuration update
          • Zenoh report - should be out in the next few weeks
          • Overlays - still in progress, but largely done
    • Working groups [<=5 mins each]
      • [Bence] Control

  • TransmissionLoader & plugins finalized on reviews

  • Applied for GSoC but didn’t get selected :frowning:

  • Finally (again) using LifecycleNode in ros2_control ControllerInterface!

  • Chainable controllers are coming!

  • Reviewer volunteers & lottery working well

  • [Angelo Corsaro] Edge AI

    • No updates.

  • [Martin Losa] Embedded (Agenda for the next meeting March,22)

    • Tiva™ C Series TM4C123G support
    • ROS Rider & Micro-ROS status
      • ROSRider is a low-cost robot control board that can be configured for any differential drive robot.
    • Learn how micro-ROS R&D initiative transitioned to industry
      • Micro-ROS progress since its beginning 4 years ago.

  • [Coleman] Manipulation

  • [Woodall] Middleware

    • Meeting minutes and agenda:
    • Discussed items:
      • Managed Node error processing from primary state
      • Source timestamp and sequence numbers in message info
      • Strategies for detecting message version mismatches and avoiding communication when message versions do not match
    • Recurring business:
      • “listener-style” callback APIs to support the Event Executor from iRobot merged
      • Making progress on Content Filtered Topic proposal

  • [Macenski] Navigation

    • CI / Rolling is broken – 22.04 migration especially with Gazebo has brought us down. Ruffin, et al is working on it but we could use some help
      • Lack of Gazebo / Gazebo ROS adds a wrench, we wrongly assumed we had it until 2025 on the same ROS LTS platform → seems odd to drop Gazebo support at an LTS
    • New planner benchmarking utilities added
    • Working on updates to the behavior tree for improved performance
    • Working on improvements to controllers
    • Improvements to Smac Planner
      • Fixing a few bugs; speeding up Lattice computation; angle normalization crash fix; etc
    • Improvements to Python Simple Commander API
      • Allowing use of all action request fields
      • Updating to include recoveries
      • Updating to include controller access
      • Allowing remap of navigation’s wait until active functions for customized namespaces / different high level navigation orchestration nodes
      • Essentially completed – can create autonomy systems fully in python using the API if desirable (but not recommended)

  • [Andrei] Real-Time

  • [Biggs] Client libraries

    • We have governance information now!
    • Kicked off life cycle redesign
      • The existing life cycle design has several edge cases and under-defined aspects
    • Read-only parameters discussion - should they be truly read-only?
      • Plug-ins can’t undeclare parameters when the plugin is unloaded - this is the true problem
      • Perhaps we need to separate “immutable-to-all” and “read-only to external entities” concepts

  • [Biggs] Safety

  • [Deray] Security

    • Held meeting on the 8th of March: minutes - recording. Most notably, there was a presentation on NoDL and its use in security.

  • [Macneil] Web

    • New forward and reverse message iterator interface for rosbag javascript library (rosbag#52)
    • Fixed timestamp parsing and serialization in RTPS javascript library (rtps#16)
    • Foxglove Studio: Custom plot series colors (studio#2988), Customizable sensor_msgs/LaserScan rendering (studio#2952), mcap support (studio#2963)

  • [Knapp/Blasdel] Tooling

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CC @smac

To provide more context, Gazebo 11 is available on 22.04 (Jammy) directly from Ubuntu upstream. Jammy isn’t stable yet, and there are currently incompatibilities preventing OpenCV and Gazebo from being installed side-by-side, which are being corrected. This kind of thing is to expect when working with unstable distros (Jammy and Rolling).

Gazebo 11 will be officially supported on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal) until 2025, as documented since release day. This means that the Gazebo team will be making minor and patch releases on Focal with bug fixes and backwards-compatible features. Gazebo 11 is also available on Ubuntu Jammy, but that will be locked on the upstream version, without minor or patch releases.

We recommend that Rolling / Humble users migrate from Gazebo 11 to Fortress, as that will be the Gazebo simulator with the highest level of support for those distros.

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