ROSCon 2018 Informal Meetings of Special Interest Groups

ROScon Brazilian lunch meetup

When: 12:30 lunch break Day 1. Sept 29th

Where: Second floor at the entrance of the lunch area (Florencia),

How to find us: Look for the Brazilian t-shirt :slight_smile:

2 Likes

ROS-Industrial meet-up

When: Day 1, Saturday Sept. 29 from 13:15 - 13:45

Where: Booth #10 (ROS-Industrial Consortia) in the exhibition area

How to find us: Look for @ThiloZimmermann and colleagues.

Agenda:
(1) get update from upcoming events in Europe
(2) watch our ROS-I demo
(4) talk about advance manufacturing/industrial applications
(3) ask your questions

ROSIN_MeetUs_at_ROSCon

2 Likes

MoveIt! Users Meetup

When: Day 1, Saturday Sept 29th during the 10:30-11:00 coffee break

Where: PickNik’s Exhibition Booth

How to find us: Use the booth map, look for robot arms, or find @davetcoleman

Agenda: Meet fellow developers, bring your ideas, and ask pressing questions

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ROS Webtool Meetup

When: Day 1, Saturday during afternoon coffee break

Where: near registration desk

How to find us: look for Jihoon @jihoonl near registration desk

Agenda: rosbridge, robot web tool in general, maintenance, and potentially ros2.

1 Like

Autonomous Vehicles / Self-Driving Aficionados Meetup

When: 12:30 at Lunch, Day 2, Sept 30th
Where: FLORENCIA (Lunch Room A)
How to find us: Look for a guy wearing a C-turtle t-shirt with a big scarf and the same guy from the ros_control meetup.
Agenda: We are looking for a friendly chat with fellow AV developers and those interested. What is it you’d use ROS for (and which flavour) and what is it you think could be improved on? What do you find challenging with this field? Do you think the future of AV lies in proprietary software or should be similarly opened up like many of the related research topics are?
Everyone is welcome, we only ask to leave your competitive hats at the hotel for this meetup :slight_smile:

2 Likes

Modularity meetup

When: Day 1, Saturday during the morning coffee break

Where: Erle Robotics stand.

How to find us: In front of to the entrance of the Europa Room (Exhibitor Hall)

ErleRobotics
Agenda: Modularity and system integration in robotics

  1. Robot component incompatibility: vendor lock-in.
  2. Common infrastructure: HRIM and H-ROS SoM.
  3. Open discussion.
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Reproducibility in robotics by using ROS

What: How can we reproduce robotics results?

When: On Sunday, 18:30 after the always funny closing remarks by @rgariepy

Where: At The Construct booth #17

How to find us: just go to the booth n.17

Agenda: we are going to discuss about how can we have an environment for reproducing robotics results and benchmark them. Questions to answer:

  1. Is ROS a good framework for reproducibility of robotics results?
  2. Should reproducibility be based on bags, simulations or real robots?
  3. Should we concentrate on reproducibility for a very specific robotics problem first, and then attack all other problems, or should we generate a common framework for any type of robotics problems?
  4. How can we learn about reproducibility in other domains of science?

Atention we will record the whole audio discussion and publish it on the ROS Developers Podcast. I will act as moderator to ensure that we deal with all the points.

2 Likes

XEL Network meetup

When: Day 1, Saturday, Sept 29th during 13:20-13:40 Lunch break

Where: ROBOTIS’s Exhibition Booth

How to find us: Use the booth map or find the TurtleBot3 at the exhibition area

Agenda:
(1) Modular H/W ecosystem using ROS 2
(2) In celebration of the XEL Network Project release, 100 sets will be distributed free of charge at ROSCon2018
(3) ROS2 demo using TurtleBot3 and XEL Network
(4) Open discussion (e.g. ros2arduino, new ideas, roadmap, any questions)

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ROSIN Funding for Focused Technical Projects

When: Day 1, Saturday Sept. 29 from 10:30 - 11:00

Where: Booth #10 (ROS-Industrial Consortia) in the exhibition area

How to find us: Look for @chcorbato and colleagues.

Agenda:

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Snap users meetup

When: 12:30 lunch day 1 (or any other time, really)

Where: FLORENCIA (Lunch Room A)

How to find us: Look for folks wearing bright orange Ubuntu lanyards. I’m afraid I don’t quite have the distinctive beard I previously had. Don’t worry, it’ll come back.

Agenda: I’m one of the primary snapcraft maintainers, and other engineers from Canonical are here as well. We’d love to talk about your experience creating ROS snaps, answer any of your questions, and provide any assistance we can!

1 Like

Arm cross-compilation and the github.com/ROS2-for-arm

When: 30th Sept at 11:50
Where: Florence room
How to fund us: Look for the “ARM” sign (probably hand written).
Agenda:

  • Find out what are the main issues for people cross-compiling to Arm
  • Explain our proposal to move the CMake toolchain files into the official ROS2 repos and have it as a first citizen in the ROS project (instead of Arm trying to catch-up with broken builds).
2 Likes

ROS Web Tools Meetup

Because the afternoon coffee break was cut short we’re going to have the meetup this evening at the reception.

When: At the start of the reception after the group photo (Scheduled 18:10)
Where: Near the registration desk.
How to find us: Look for Jihoon @jihoonl nearby.
Agenda: rosbridge, robot web tools in general, maintenance, and potentially ros2.

ROS2 Embedded Interest Group Meeting

Several groups are working on integrating micro controllers better with ROS2. Let’s meet to discuss next steps and joint activities!

When:

Sunday the 30th at lunch (13:20).

Where:

Upstairs lunch area.

How to find us:

We’ll try to grab a table right at the entrance and put a sign up.

3 Likes

Gazebo user discussion

When: Sunday Day 2 1605 (just after lightning talks)

Where: Overflow viewing area (Madrid 4)

How to find us: Steve Peters and Jose Rivero will have a table set up

5 Likes

ROS 2 Actions discussion

When: Day 2 morning break

Where: In or around the coffee area near the lifts.

How to find us: Look for Geoff Biggs with the messy hair.

Notes from the Gazebo Interest Group, my apologies for any errors:

Attendees:

Andrew Symington @Andrew_Symington

Carlos Rosales Gallegos @carlosjoserg

Musa Morena Marcusso @musamarcusso

Ray Cole @raycoleiii

Robert Lösch

Marcus

Ruffin @ruffsl

Plus many Open Robotics people

Gazebo not shutting down properly

Sim of wheeled robots driving in mining tunnels, but the simulation is slow and he doesn’t know why

Had a problem with robot not falling after attaching robot arm with position controller

How to learn more about gazebo_ros

How to unthrottle simulation that could go faster than real-time

Is the CreateLink function working? (written by @jrivero, not sure who asked this)

Spawning models:

  • Race conditions if one needs to be spawned before the other (such as a free-floating robot on a granite table, want them to be spawned dynamically so they can be written in urdf)
    • There is a spawn_model service in gazebo_ros, but it returns too fast
    • Shane discussed a special xml tag to insert an SDF
  • The spawn_model service should use quaternions instead of roll-pitch-yaw

While running lots of simulations, sometimes the simulation fails with a GLX-related error

  • If it’s just gzserver and it doesn’t use rendering, these errors can be avoided by disabling rendering in gzserver (it will also speed it up slightly) by using a bad DISPLAY variable or running inside a docker container that doesn’t have nvidia-docker enabled

FBX support

  • There are lots of existing models on sketchfab, often in FBX format. Bosch is interested in being able to parse FBX models.
    • Ian has worked on this, but it’s proprietary and complicated. We may come back to it if there is sufficient interest and support.

Modeling sea-floor

  • Current workflow is to bake lots of textures into a single mesh, but it’s hard to export from blender.
    • Is the sea-floor like a DEM? There are some performance advantages to using DEM’s.

VisualPlugins

  • Underwater plumes are visualized in RVIZ with markers, but want to visualize in gzclient too. Is it possible?
    • It’s easier with markers. (I didn’t get all of Louise’s answer here)

Camera following

  • Some sequence of moving camera and then follow an object caused camera to go a bit crazy

Camera Z-up

  • Some people need to use Z-down, so it’s hard to make the camera point upside down. Andrew Symington would like to turn off the camera auto-flip

Domain randomization

2 Likes

Summary from the ROSCon cross-compilation Meetup:

Current issues faced by users cross compiling ROS 2:

  • lack of Python or third party library support in the instructions currently hosted on the ros2-for-arm organization.

  • lack of instructions + sysroot for Android compilation makes it hard to compile high level packages and demos

Suggestions:

  • Provide a single place for aggregating cross-compilation instructions

  • Community members can modify the content to add instructions for their platform/architecture.

  • Community members will also be in charge of testing / updating the instructions they provided if necessary.

  • Possible location: a page on the ros2 wiki with section for each platform/architecture.

  • Leveraging existing toolchains and infrastructure (@esteve suggested polly) could reduce maintenance effort and provide better experience for users.

  • contributors can elect to provide a sysroot to allow installing and linking against target libraries more easily.

I unfortunately don’t have the full list of attendees, @nuclearsandwich @wjwwood @filipe.rinaldi @pokitoz @lmayencourt feel free to add missing information or @ attending participants I didn’t tag above.

ROSCon Security Meetup | Meeting Minutes

September 30th, 2018

Attendees:

Topics

  • Trusted Execution Environment (TEE)
    • Context
      • Enable sealing of secrets such as private key to protect PKI identity
      • Protecting run time session keys from other processes on the same host
    • Proposed
      • API for writing DDS-Security plugins leveraging ARM’s TrustZone
      • Performance overhead impacts of bifurcated trusted computation yet to be characterized
  • Securing parameters in ROS2
    • Context
      • Remote parameters access is conducted via service interlaces
      • Current mapping between ROS2 to DDS only facilitates node-level access control
      • However all or none read/write access to a node’s local parameters is too granular
      • I.e. individual parameters access permission can not be precisely enforced
    • Proposed
      • Securing individual parameters on a node by enforcing DDS key permissions
      • Leverage the upcoming (DDS Security v1.2) ability of specifying keys in DDS permission plugin
      • This will require ROS 2 to used keyed messages for parameters interfaces
  • Granular segmentation of ROS2 netwroks
    • Context
      • DDS domains IDs are used control discovery/crosswalk between DDS systems
      • Possible domain IDs are derived from a finite range of integers
      • Domain collisions may be unavoidable in public or populated LANs
    • Proposed
      • Next revision of the RTPS specification will introduce domain tags (arbitrary string)
      • Enabling isolation between ROS2 systems using the same DDS domain ID
  • Expected behavior with locally insufficient permissions
    • Context
      • DDS implementations preform sanity checks when creating data readers/writers
      • Creation of reader/writer will fail if local permission are insufficient
      • Is it expected that failing to create services when permissions are insufficient should crash a node?
    • Proposed
      • RMW bubbles up warning
        • ROS2 node process continues along
        • Pro: Downstream users may restrict a third-party node’s access to remaining system without modifying released nodes
        • Con: Indeterminate program behavior for nodes that do not actually connect with interfaces requested
      • RMW bubbles up error
        • ROS2 node may crash due to insufficient permissions
        • Pro: clearer defined behavior for downstream users
        • Pro: burden of permission handling is on informed upstream developer
        • Con: Extra profiling of necessary permission is required to prevent node from crashing at runtime, e.g from dynamic topic name creation
    • Conclusion
      • Yes, downstream users cannot block node interfaces without coordinating with the upstream node, such as through constructor arguments enabling or disabling functionality

Awesome summary, I wish I could have been there. I was looking around at ROSCon but was never able to find you. I’m an engineer at Amazon and we’re also doing some work on security-related items for ROS2. I’d really like to get your input and find out what other folks are working on.

I’ve organized an ROS2 Security Online Meetup on Monday Oct 15th @ 17:00 PDT. Please feel free to join and give your input.

I started a new discussion thread about cross-compilation here: