ROS 2 TSC Meeting Minutes: July 24th, 2018
-
Attendees:
- Expected:
- Open Robotics
- Tully Foote, Brian Gerkey, Chris Lalancette, Louise Poubel, Dirk Thomas, William Woodall
- Amazon
- Doug Fulop
- Apex.ai
- Dejan Pangercic
- Arm
- Matt Spencer
- Bosch
- Karsten Knese
- Christian
- Denso
- Jens Wawerla
- Intel
- Peter Adams, Matt Hansen, Kelly Hammond, Greg Burns
- LG
- Seonman Kim
- Microsoft
- Lou Amadio
- TARDEC
- Phil Frederick
- Bill Thomasmeyer
- TRI
- Allison Thackston
- Open Robotics
- Expected:
-
Housekeeping: 10 mins
- Get situated and sort out comms issues
- Brian briefly introduces the participants
- Brian briefly sets context for the meeting
-
Meta-policy: 20 mins
- Present and discuss the draft TSC charter, with proposed amendments, including:
- How should the TSC have bidirectional comms with community?
- Possibly an open Discourse thread.
- Look at a protected Category, public read, TSC only write.
- How are member reps designated? Free choice, key code contributors, or something else?
- Err on the side of caution to set the ground rules up front. It’s better to have a process to remove someone from the committee. Changing the rules is pretty painful.
- Representative people will change providing different personalities
- TSC could determine what is a significant contribution.
- Keeping diversity is important, different branches of robotics. (Cars, drones, indoor…)
- There should be a designee, but could send a proxy. (There’s only really a significant issue if there’s a vote.)
- Person should have some oversight of the roadmap at the company
- Representing lots of distributed government contributions is potentially a challenge.
- Which repos/orgs constitute “the project” for the purpose of making contributions?
- Something that’s seen as beneficial to the community. (needs clarification)
- How many orgs currently qualify for membership? Should we cap TSC size?
- Proposal: make working groups (WGs) for specific topics and to keep the TSC itself smaller.
- A consensus beyond 20 is hard to get.
- In the future we could raise the threshold of FTEs to keep the group from growing too much.
- Are there ways to make sure to keep smaller companies voices so they don’t get squeezed out.
- Some companies want a small platform level engagement.
- Seniority could be taken into account.
- Could use subcommittees who designate a representative.
- A standard procedure for generating working groups can help provide a hierarchy to let more focused projects/topics.
- Proposal: make working groups (WGs) for specific topics and to keep the TSC itself smaller.
- Procedures:
- Quorum size, proxy mechanism, ejection procedure
- We’re all here with good intentions, but at some point there’s likely some conflict that will come up and should be planned for.
- Quorum size, proxy mechanism, ejection procedure
- How should the TSC have bidirectional comms with community?
- Approve and publish the charter.
- Open Robotics will take this feedback and recirculate the TSC Charter.
- Present and discuss the draft TSC charter, with proposed amendments, including:
-
Policy: 20 mins
- Proposal: require DCO for future ROS 2 development (https://developercertificate.org/).
- Consider use of an automated system for tracking DCOs on PRs like the Probot DCO app for GitHub (https://github.com/apps/dco).
- Consider retroactively getting DCOs for previous contributions.
- The pain of CLAs is quite a lot of pain.
- It’s well automated, but there is overhead to get permission and teach new contributors.
- Need clarity about which repositories require this? Community contributed repos?
- Current DCO allows “compatible licenses”, risk of MIT code coming into a project. (Could clarify this under the contribution guide). Issue will come up with BSD 3-clause ROS1 imports
- Committing policies
- 2FA on repos
- Signed commits
- Implement this and make it the recommendation.
- Proposal: Open Robotics to apply for a trademark on the “ROS 2” name and/or logo (do we have an agreed upon logo?).
- Focus on ROS (2 is just a version) don’t want to embed the version in the mark.
- Follow up with lawyers also ask them about other things that might be attached
- Discuss policy for use of the name/logo and plans for enforcement.
- ROS2 Certified/compatible (TSC certified) – would need a process. Could become a working group.
- Focus on ROS (2 is just a version) don’t want to embed the version in the mark.
- Add Coverity (or similar) scanning
- IP Scanning is top priority
- Static analysis is also important, especially security scanning.
- This would be good for a working group.(IP and technical aspects are possibly separable)
- There is overhead for developers.
- TARDEC already has some security analysis already going too.
- Discuss TSC meeting frequency
- Starting out, monthly might not be enough.
- Overtime we might be able to back off to quarterly.
- For the short term release there might be value to a bi-weekly meeting.
- Possibly a separate group for tracking progress
- Can escalate to strategic process
- Open the floor for proposals to introduce or amend other policies.
- Proposal: require DCO for future ROS 2 development (https://developercertificate.org/).
-
Roadmap: 40 mins
- Dirk presents the Open Robotics roadmap for ROS 2 Crystal (December 2018):
- https://github.com/ros2/ros2/wiki/Roadmap
- How can we accelerate a specific project/roadmap item? Do we need to vote?
- How do we oversee contributions?
- Should Open Robotics be allocating resources to oversee external contributions to make sure that they are acceptable.
- Definitely for TSC members. Clear deliverables and approach. Design work to make sure that we don’t box ourselves in.
- Discuss and take questions on the current roadmap.
- Open the floor for proposals to amend the roadmap, including:
- Which platforms to support (Ubuntu version(s), QNX, macOS, Windows)
- Should Open Robotics explicitly allocate people / time to coordinate development at other orgs?
- This would be valuable for TSC coordination/contributions.
- Are there realtime targets for this cycle?
- Currently laying groundwork
- Functional safety is important to several members
- TurtleBot packages
- Intel and Amazon are both interested
- TurtleBot3 in simulation would be valuable.
- TurtleBot2 port is partial. Beta2 demo worked.
- Would like this available for testing navigation
- depth_image_to_laserscan
- navigation
- Intel – want to have something by Crystal
- Amazon
- TRI
- Worth a working group.
- blocked by actions, for a full port
- Dynamic memory allocation
- Apex
- Shared memory transport and performance
- Apex
- LG
- Not complete DDS implementations (FastRTPS)
- Alex
- Security related improvements
- ARM Amazon
- Possibly a working group on middleware
- Web based visualization tool
- TRI
- Gazebo
- TRI
- Microcontroller support
- ARM
- Heterogeneous computing
- ARM
- Denso (arm32)
- Microsoft (arm32)
- General platform support
- 16.04 Xenial Support
- Apex
- How do we determine the goal platforms
- Potentially infinite work with
- Reference architectures, such as TB3
- Include compute and
- Qt has a possible model
- Tier 1 platforms all fully tested
- Tier 2 platforms are only tested periodically.
- Tier 3 platforms will probably work but they don’t test them
- Amazon is interested
- Possible approach
- Tier 1 support requires contributions
- Tiier 2 can be added but only tested at release time
- 16.04 Xenial Support
- It would be good to fill in extra FTEs in the roadmap
- How should we organize the work?
- Trying to do the work in the open.
- Discourse/github issues
- Trying to do the work in the open.
- Open robotics can’t oversee the process, the TSC can charter new working groups. It would be good to have Open Robotics in working groups. Can provide high level strategic feedback/vision.
- It would be good to have some oversight of migration techniques.
- Approve and publish the roadmap.
- Dirk presents the Open Robotics roadmap for ROS 2 Crystal (December 2018):
Followups:
- Update Charter
- Review and prepare official minutes
- Create communication channel
