Technical Steering Committee (TSC) Meeting #37 (2021/12/15) Minutes

Autoware
1

2021/12/15 15:00 UTC

Attendees

  • Ryohsuke Mitsudome (TSC Chair)
  • Shinpei Kato (AWF)
  • Yang Zhang (AWF)
  • Christian John (SPC)
  • Larry Dimitrievski (SPC)
  • Bonolo Mathibela (AWF)
  • Xinyu Wang (AWF)
  • M. Fatih Cırıt (AWF)
  • Hiroshi Igata (ODD WG)
  • David W (Open AD Kit WG)
  • Wojciech Jaworski (Software WG)
  • Kerem Par (ADASTEC)
  • Anthony DeFilippo (ADLINK)
  • Kasper Ornstein Mecklenburg (Arm)
  • Stephen Li (AutoCore)
  • Akihiko Tsukada (eSOL)
  • Jaime Martin Losa (eProsima)
  • Rahul Mangharam (F1 Tenth Foundation)
  • Michael Li (ITRI)
  • Mert Colak (Leo Drive)
  • Lokesh Kumar Goel (LGE)
  • Adam Dabrowski (Robotec.ai)
  • Naoyori TANZAWA (Tier IV)

Minutes:

Action items

Confirmation of previous minutes

Working group report: Autonomy Software (10 min)

Action Item:

  • Contact eve autonomy to include their demo video into AWF video as well

Working group report: Operational Design Domain (10 min)

  • The ODD working group members have been successfully registered for the CI/CD pipeline in preparation to create the machine-readable scenarios which defines the public road bus service.
  • Continuing the use case discussion of the public road bus service based on ITRI‘s use case document. The discussion topics include the following points.
    • Local traffic rules
    • Passengers (all to be seated, advised to buckle up)
    • Other road users (NPCs) : bikes, pedestrians, cars
    • Sensor types, numbers
    • Vehicle specifications (size, powertrain, etc.)
  • Planning to incorporate the use case information from the shuttle bus project of Tier IV’s.
  • Planning to have another walkthrough of the CI/CD pipeline, the scenario editor, etc. for new members.

Working group report: Hardware (10 min)

  • Support for Racing Work Group and Analysis & discussions about the hardware
  • Autoware.Auto supported hardware list preparation
  • Eve Autonomy & Upower Cargo ODD Reference hardware architecture preparation
  • Ongoing: Racing hardware architecture preparation
  • Proposal to change Working Group Lead from Joe to Armagan

Stephen:

  • GA should be opportunity for sensor vendors to be involved in the working group
  • CJ to follow up with Stephen offline.

Working group report: Simulation (10 min)

  • Preparation of the airport vehicle model (scene is ready)
  • TierIV CI/CD testing : Plan to compare results of scenario_simulator in cloud vs. local to verify reliability of the cloud.
  • Working on adding more metrics to results of the scenarios execution:
    • FloridaPoly prepared initial set of metrics
    • FloridaPoly developed draft of Metric Calculation ROS2 Node (To be reviewed by Joseph)
    • Plan to integrate sample metric calculation node in scenario_simulator_v2 and adding value of metric to the report (in local execution of scenarios initially)

Working group report: Racing (10 min)

  • Working group attendance and meetings are progressing well, good attendance every week
  • Overall refinement and definition of WG goals and and activities on the gitlab page: Racing working group · Wiki · Autoware Foundation / Autoware Foundation · GitLab
  • Main Achievements:
    • Various Live Meetups: The working group members meet a few times in person. These events were used to demonstrate and showcase Autoware Efforts and to discuss internal progress. We attended the following events (almost all WG members were present)
      • DIY Robocar Event September
      • DIY Robocar Event December
      • Autoware Hackathon September, California (@Circuit Launch)
      • Autoware Hackathon December, California (@AWS)
      • Indy Autonomous Challenge October
      • Autoware Meetup December @UPower
    • Racing Simulation: we are heavily using SVL simulator for all our simulation efforts. We achieved several milestones in the field of Simulation:
  1. 2 complete Sensor setups for the F1TENTH vehicle in the SVL Simulator.
  2. Created 4 different Real-World racetrack maps (Red Bull Ring, Monza, Silverstone, Hungaroring) on a 1:10 scale and 1:1 scale for the SVL simulator.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO72j5dZEg0
  3. SVL Simulator can now run on AWS with the help of Robomaker. We were able to created cloud instances that can run SVL simulator

  • F1TENTH + Autoware.Auto:

    • We have now everything in ROS2 on the F1TENTH Vehicle
    • We were able to run Autoware.Auto with the F1TENTH car in the SVL simulator. With the help of additional localization methods from the ROS2 NAV2 stack we were able to localize the vehicle with the 2D Lidar

  • Current Hurdles and Work in Progress:

    • Bringing Autoware.Auto alive on the real F1TENTH vehicle. This work was more complicated than thought in the beginning, but now we should have all components (ROS2 drivers, localization techniques) together to test it on the vehicle.
    • F1TENTH hardware: We currently have problems to order F1TENTH hardware components e.g. the chassis or the NVIDIA Jetson NX. This will be an ongoing problem in the future. We are seeking for alternative solutions and replacement parts, but especially in the embedded systems field we will not have many choices

  • Future to Dos:

    • Developing new algorithms (perception, planning and control) for the F1TENTH and racing vehicles that are able to operate on the limits of handling.
    • Refining the AWS and SVL integration: Currently this setup can only be done with manual tuning. We are searching for a solution to create an Image of a complete environment and then upload it to AWS marketplace so everyone can use it easier.
    • Las Vegas Challenge with Indy Autonomous cars: On the 7th of January the Indy Autonomous cars are going to the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Everybody that is attending CES is allowed to attend there too

Working group report: Open AD Kit (10 min)

  • Testing Open AD Kit v1.0 on AVA Kit
    • Is looking for additional developers to help with testing on different platforms. E.g., for AutoCore
  • Asking marketing team to provide storefront
  • Working on CI for Github for containerization
    • Moving to docker compose from ade

Gitlab or Github (Tier IV)

Discussion:

  • BoD: We should modify autoware-ai/autoware.ai to Autoware/autoware so that we can give users notice about the transition.
    • We should contact Github to replace currently inactive “autoware” account with AWF’s organization
      • CJ and Daisuke to organize the renaming of the organization
    • Fatih: How should we keep the Git History?
      • We can create a cloned repository to keep the history
    • Yang: we can still keep the history even if we delete all of the contents.
      • This would make more visible with the growth of autoware
  • Bonolo:
    • From project management perspective, Gitlab works out-of-the-box whereas Github requires some setup. However, Tier IV has did the trial to mimic the current project management pipeline in Github already so we should be able to replace Gitlab with Github.
  • David: Any discussion made regarding the tools and transition period for Working Groups.
    • Bonolo: Wiki’s and issues should be able to be moved to Github
    • We should have a tutorial session in each Working Group about the transition in January

Decision made:

  • We move back to Github from the next ODD development cycle
    • The naming of organization + repository should be discussed with Github

Autoware Universe/Core Update (TSC Chair)

2021215-Core_Universe and Development Process.pdf (398.2 KB)

CJ: How does Open AD Kit work with this new architecture?

  • Details to be discussed offline

Proposal to Migrate to Discord from Slack (Fatih)

  • Fatih to present:
    Migrate to Discord.pdf (575.0 KB)

  • Shinpei: We should discuss about higher level scheme. E.g., instant messaging in Discord, long term discussion Discourse, bug reports in Github.

  • How should we transfer the users?

  • Yang: We should be clear about the goal that we want to achieve first. If we are trying to make members more active, tool(slack/discord) is only one aspect.

  • What is the timeline?

    • Fatih: The actual work only takes two days.
    • Shinpei: We would like to have more details when we make the announcement, including the communication strategy.
      • Further discussion would be done with Marketing/SPC first then return to Fatih within a week

TSC Chair Election Update

  • Same protocol/requirements as 2021
  • Self-nomination Jan 3-14, Voting Jan 17-21
2 Likes