ROS 2 TSC Meeting Minutes 8-18-2022

General
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ROS 2 TSC Contribution Report 2022-08-18.pdf (128.4 KB)

ROS 2 TSC Meeting Agenda 2022-8-18

  • Attendees

    • Open Robotics - Chris Lalancette, William Woodall, Kat Scott, Geoff Biggs, Audrow Nash, Michael Jeronimo, Tully Foote
    • Community Representative - Olivier Michel
    • Toyota Research Institute - Ian McMahon
    • ZettaScale - Luca Cominardi
    • Microsoft - Tim Chung
    • Jaime Martin Losa (eProsima)
    • Jeremie Deray (artivis) | Canonical
    • ROBOTIS - Will Son
    • PickNik Robotics - Tyler Weaver
    • Sony - Tomoya Fujita
    • Amazon - Aaron Blasdel, Camilo Buscaron
    • Wind River - Andrei Kholodnyi
    • iRobot - Alberto Soragna
    • Michael Rippenger (ROS-I Americas), Michael Orlov, David Anthony, Jeremie Deray, Brett, Emerson, Jerry Towler, Lou, Brian, Patrick, Steve,
    • Apex.AI — Lyle Johnson
    • Samsung Research - Steve Macenski
    • SwRI (representing GVSC) - David Anthony (sub for Jerry Towler)

  • Preliminaries

    • [Kat ][1 min] Please remember to fill out your contribution report at the bottom of this document prior to the meeting.
    • Please register early for ROSCon. We have extended the early registration deadline.

  • Old business

    • [Kat][5 min] – Second request for TSC members to contribute to ROS 2 Documentation
    • [Geoff][20 min] - Discussion: What would it take to build a Zenoh RMW?
      • Deck
      • TL;DR Zenoh has a lot of nice properties that may make it better RMW for those just starting to learn ROS.
      • Open Robotics and Zettascale are looking for contributions and funding to make this happen.
      • If you are interested in this project contact Geoffrey Biggs
      • TODO: Update at September meeting
    • [Chris][20 min] – REP Evaluation / Discussion
      • Approval of REP-2005 modifications
      • REP-155 - HRI - a number of new comments came in - reread, rediscuss next week. Also will refer the TSC to this one
        • Cam +1
        • David Anthony Lack of hands and feet may be a problem
          • What about multiple fields of views? How to reconcile?
        • Andrei - good stuff - question is how mature it is, how can we prove it is ready to be merged
        • Camilo: Does it conform to the kinect skeleton formats? Probably want feedback from the Kinect folks.
        • William - seems to be geared to ROS 1
          • Could be ported to ROS 2 without much problem
          • Creates a lot of topics depending on # of entities
          • DDS would typically use keys
          • If people use it with ROS 2, may run into performance problems
          • First time this pattern has come up in an REP
          • Ian - introspection benefits from large number of topics
        • Acceptance would be draft status – would require broader socialization
        • REP Accepted as DRAFT
      • REP-2008 - Hardware acceleration - a number of new comments came in - reread, rediscuss next week. Also will refer the TSC to this one
        • William – TSC Working Group should be reviewing this.
        • Andrei – The Hardware Acceleration Working Group is a community working group – no representative on the TSC
        • Andrei - Good to have owner so we can ask particular questions
          • Not sure understand the ament extensions, what all of this is about
          • How is this related to OpenCL interface, as opposed to firmware. Why do we need dedicated extensions?
          • Would it be an option to use more industry standards?
        • William
          • The tools make sense
          • Main complaint is that there is too much stuff in it
          • It creates a lot of taxonomies and categories, maybe unnecessarily
          • Overall motivation makes sense
          • Motivation for individual parts is unclear, hard to follow
          • Time consuming and hard to read
        • Camilo
          • Can take a further look
        • Ian
          • Less familiar with embedded hardware acceleration
          • See fair amount of utilization of proprietary runtimes
          • Surprised to see it in a REP
          • William: But those are just examples; maybe structural problem in the REP
          • ament_vitis relies on Vitis proprietary tools - surprised to see it
        • Decision - will get Victor into next TSC meeting to discuss
          • Proposal – have REP discussion at end of meeting so discussion can go over / continue as needed.

  • New business

  • [Ian/TRI][10 min] – Real-World Experience ROS 2 Networking

    • Kat – I have heard similar concerns from PAL Robotics and F1-Tenth
    • Tyler: Yes, pain point for us and our customers… including moving dangerous expensive robots accidentally by new developers.
    • Alberto: yes, we only use unicast communication to communicate with robots
    • Adrian: +1 to localhost by default. but it is worth having a REP to discuss?
    • Geoff: Working on a tool that may address this – early PRs next month
    • Should we do this process as a REP? William Woodall: YES
    • TODO: Longer discussion at September TSC
    • Should future ROS 2 releases default to be fully communicative between machines or default to localhost only traffic (ROS_LOCALHOST_ONLY=1)?
    • Are any TSC members actively working towards ROS 2 level documentation of “localhost only” network traffic? If not, we can coordinate with other interested members to add to the documentation. DDS level documentation would be a welcome bonus.

  • Recurring business

  • [Andrei] Real-Time

  • [Biggs] Client libraries

    • No updates (summer break)

  • [Biggs] Safety

    • No updates this month

  • [Deray] Security

    • No update - WG on summer break.

  • [Macneil] Web

    • A couple small bug fixes in rosbridge (#776, #777)
    • In collaboration with rosbag2 WG, starting an evaluation and proposal to use mcap as default format in rolling. Call for interest/participation.

  • [Orlov] Rosbag2 and Tooling

2 Likes
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I’m not sure if the “Real-World ROS 2 Networking” discussion touched on other issues besides LOCALHOST_ONLY, but I’m curious if the follow up might include any look at improving the “out of the box” networking experience in other ways. Multiple users in this post reported issues without a general solution or plan to try to improve things. Possibly some work has gone on behind the scenes but it can be hard to see what’s going on across all the repos.

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@IanTheEngineer from TRI is heading up this effort. Your best bet is to discuss the matter with him. He will be presenting at the next meeting.

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I’ll also point out that one of the roadmap items for Open Robotics for Iron is to improve the DDS experience. You can see what kinds of things we plan to work on at Roadmap — ROS 2 Documentation: Rolling documentation (though I admit it is not super-detailed).

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