ROS TSC Meeting Notes 2019-02-21

ROS TSC Meeting Notes February 21st, 2019

  • Attendees:
    • Dirk, Tully, Brian (Open Robotics)
    • Peter (Intel)
    • Karsten (Bosch)
    • Victor (Acutronic)
    • Jaime (eProsima)
    • Allison (TRI)
    • Dejan (Apex)
    • Rutvik (Amazon)
    • Seonman (LGE)
    • Matt D & Jon Smereka (TARDEC)
  • [10 min] [Brian] New member introductions:
    • [Victor] Acutronic
      • 2 minute company overview
    • [Jaime] eProsima
      • 2 minute company overview
  • [2 min] [Brian] ROS trademark status update
    • Application is mostly prepared, with a few remaining questions. Draft “descriptions of goods and services” is ready.
    • We may need more details on ROS logo usage in some classes, including first dates.
  • [2 min] [Dirk] DCO bot update
    • Some limitations when using the web UI to edit [e.g. #102]
    • Want to add more information to the repos CONTRIBUTING.md files before enabling globally
    • Amazon has successfully used it.
  • [5 min] [Brian] Elevator pitch
    • Why ROS 2? Draft shared by Brian, with summary bullets being:
    • Designed for production
  • Multi-platform
  • No vendor lock-in
  • Built on open standards
  • Permissive open source license
  • Global community
    • Suggestions to be added / integrated:
      • Tools, libraries, capabilities
      • Ecosystem
      • Industry grade vs. production, with respect to quality
      • Platform implies hardware (e.g., specific SBCs, BSPs) in automotive
      • Highlight companies’ support (e.g., via TSC)
      • Cross-domain platforms (not just ground), planes, quads, orbiting satellites, subterranean robots
      • Accelerating time to market, should be faster than proprietary solutions
    • Brian to circulate updated draft among TSC.
  • [5 min] [Dirk] Dashing update:
  • WG updates
    • [5 min] [Peter (in lieu of Matt H.)] Navigation
      • Q: Replacing custom actions with standard actions planned?
      • Q: Replacing custom dyn reconf with standard parameters (once they support ranges) planned?
      • Matt on vacation – look for offline update
    • [5 min] [Rutvik] Security
      • Primary work stream was for threat model, picked up again, working on first draft of document
      • Working on reference architecture based on TurtleBot
    • [5 min] [Dejan] Real-time and safety
      • Real-time status and goals tracked at https://gitlab.com/AutowareAuto/AutowareAuto/issues/65
      • Q: What is latency target?
        • Focused on example automotive use case
      • Q: Behavior can be very different on hardware platforms. There’s not a lot of testing on specific hardware.
        • Building on prior work by OSADL (empirical demonstration of latencies in RT-PREEMPT-patched kernel on specific hardware)
      • Safety WG will be picked up by Geoff Biggs, expect a Discourse post to start this effort.
    • [5 min] [Karsten] Embedded
  • [5 min] [Dejan] ROS 2 integration test framework
  • [5 min] [Victor] From Matt H.: Acutronic and PickNik announced a partnership on Discourse, beginning work on MoveIt! 2.0 on ROS2.
    • Q: Can they give us a brief overview of their plans and schedule?
    • Q: Will it be done in time for Dashing release?
      • Yes, its targeted for Dashing release
      • It’s on the Dashing ticket.
    • Q: Are there areas they are seeking help?
    • Q: Does this include porting ROS control?
      • Targeting minimal viable option. Might not be fully ported. There may be more use cases for more of ros_control that would be needed, but collaborators to fill that out would be appreciated.
    • Q: Does this include a refactor to take advantage of new features or a direct port?
      • Trying to take long run, leaving it up to Dave’s judgement, to still meet the deadline.
      • Would like to hear about more use cases.
  • [5 min] [Karsten] diagnostics pull request status
    • https://github.com/ros/diagnostics/pull/94
    • We were wondering how we can help pushing this PR in a review-able state. Bosch is willing to help but we want to double check with Persistent / Amazon first.
      • Amazon no longer actively working on this, would be willing to collaborate.
      • Bosch will plan to comment on the existing PR and make a set of new smaller PRs to replace them
  • [10 min] [Brian] Need for regular dev call and/or new chat system?
    • Discuss recent threads from Discourse:
    • Dejan: See two challenges. When actions were designed there wasn’t a concrete use case. Their use case has a specific corner that wasn’t in the generic design. Github is good and open/visible. Slack is horrible, only good if you need an answer in 5 minutes. Everything should have a good design doc. Adding more tooling isn’t solving the problem, you need to know what you want to do.
    • Karsten: Seconded new system will just cause more notification overloads. Highlight Deanna’s ROSCon talk, proposals, designs, etc.
    • Brian: Previous regular dev call. Worked well, but had a problem of it really just another way for people to make feature requests. Maybe new scope to say it’s only for information sharing.
    • Rutvik: Maybe an office hours model. Find a way to spread design feedback burden. Amazon would be interested in staffing an office hours.
    • Dirk: Effective deep discussions are hard with high latency written communication channels. Might make sense to have specific calls for focused topics.
    • Allison: Regular scheduled is easier for people to keep up with and find. Cartographer open house seems to work well. Mostly advice not bug fixing/reporting.
    • Dejan: Other projects have community managers who scan through tickets for unsolved issues, and ping people. Sometimes start discussions about what’s the slowdown.
      • Brian: Yeah we are distributing that role among our team.
      • Rutvik: +1 for good job from Open Robotics, but see bandwidth limitations
    • Peter: A developer conference, more working groups and discussions not as much of a presentation out like ROSCon.
  • [10 min] [Brian] New TSC applicant
    • Follow up questions, please email Brian directly. We’ll call for an asynchronous vote in the next week or two.
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