ROS 2 TSC Meeting Minutes: July 24th, 2018

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
  • 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.
      • 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.
    • Approve and publish the charter.
    • Open Robotics will take this feedback and recirculate the TSC Charter.
  • 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.
    • 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.
  • 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
      • 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
      • 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.

Followups:

  • Update Charter
  • Review and prepare official minutes
  • Create communication channel
1 Like

Can we get a “TSC” category for these so we don’t lose them?

2 Likes

+1 and thanks for the report @tfoote!

We’re using a tsc tag on all these posts. Does that approach group them well enough for you?

1 Like

Works for me. :sunny: