ROS 2 TSC Meeting Minutes: 2020-12-17

[gerkey]

ROS 2 TSC Meeting Agenda 2020-12-17

Member contribution report (127.3 KB)

• Attendees

  • Steve Macenski - Samsung Research
  • Aaron Blasdel - AWS RoboMaker (Amazon)
  • Kyle Fazzari - Canonical
  • Ralph Lange - Bosch
  • Nick Fragale - Rover Robotics
  • Jilada Eccleston - Tier IV
  • Dave Coleman, Mark Moll, Henning Kayser - PickNik
  • Brian Gerkey, Chris Lalancette, William Woodall, Geoff Biggs, Tully Foote, Kat Scott, Louise Poubel - Open Robotics
  • Will Son - ROBOTIS
  • Ian McMahon - Toyota Research Institute
  • Lokesh Kumar Goel - LG Electronics
  • Rob Woolley - Wind River (representing Andrei)
  • Joe Speed - ADLINK
  • Jaime Martin Losa - eProsima
  • Jerry Towler - SwRI (representing GVSC)

• Preliminaries

  • [Gerkey] Fill in the contribution report in this doc!

• Old business

• New business

  • [Gerkey][10 mins] Discuss new TSC applicants and call for vote
    • Decision: Gerkey to open vote Dec 18, close Jan 8 to allow for holidays
      • Opened late (Dec 22), so will also close late (Jan 12).
  • [Coleman, Kayser & Moll][15 mins] Update on MoveIt port to ROS 2
    • Presentation Slides
    • Extended discussion about the “chicken and egg” problem of ROS 2 / MoveIt 2 adoption: users wait for robots to be supported, but robot vendors wait for users to migrate.
      • We have various experiences with encouraging adoption. We’re recommending that our customers move to ROS 2, but sometimes it’s a hard sell.
      • Bigger companies are willing to make the jump earlier
      • ROS 1 remains the biggest competitor to ROS 2.
      • Can we do a better job of tracking what’s missing in ROS 2? (and what “business/migrations each missing item would unlock”) ROS 2 Product management / customer management?
        • This will be useful, but it’s not uncommon for users to throw out issues that are “blocking” only to come up with more blockers after the initial block is removed.
      • Selling based on new features (security, real-time, code quality, hybrid planning, etc.) is better than saying that they can do the same thing but with extra work.
  • [Fragale][15 mins] Next-Gen Robotics Hardware Modularity
    • Presentation slides
  • [Pangercic][3min] Executor(s) in ROS 2
    • Apex.AI started a survey document which we shared with the community experts: [External] Executor Design - Google Docs
    • If anyone is interested in the topic of (improved) executors please consider chiming in
  • [Lange][5 mins] briefly discuss about the PRs to add micro-ROS to REP-2005, i.e.
    • Add micro-ROS to REP-2005 by ralph-lange · Pull Request #290 · ros-infrastructure/rep · GitHub
    • Adds Micro XRCE-DDS repos to REP-2005 by FranFin · Pull Request #292 · ros-infrastructure/rep · GitHub
    • Add rclc packages to REP-2005. by ralph-lange · Pull Request #300 · ros-infrastructure/rep · GitHub
    • Reminder: TSC members need to approve the PR:
      • “The PR will be merged if and when the sum of TSC member vote values is >= 3 (votes of +0 and -0 are treated equally as 0 when computing the sum).”
  • [Macenski][5 min] TSC Charter confidentiality proposal https://docs.google.com/document/d/1h0hXa7-7M7VlhQgAgG2VhuY34JsRz6IhuxBJqpo6BhY/edit?usp=sharing
  • [Macenski][5 min] Self-reporting FTE analysis TSC Self-Reporting Contribution Audit - Google Sheets

• Recurring business

  • Next ROS 2 distro release
    • [Lalancette][10 mins]
      • Plan for setting CycloneDDS as the default RMW
        • Open Robotics to post announcement of this decision on Discourse today
      • C++17 - Add Galactic Geochelone to REP 2000 by cottsay · Pull Request #291 · ros-infrastructure/rep · GitHub - I haven’t heard any objections to this change, so we’ll probably go ahead with this
      • macOS support - macOS support in ROS 2 Galactic and beyond - ROS General - Open Robotics Discourse - unless we get some kind of dedicated support for it, will probably drop it to Tier 3 in Galactic
      • Follow-up about additional committers - crunched the numbers, found 3 obvious candidates for inviting to core committers. Will be sending out invitations tomorrow/early next week
    • [Pangercic][3min] Follow-up on signing up for the items in ROS 2 G
      • There were no additional volunteers for the implementation of the features https://index.ros.org/doc/ros2/Roadmap/#id2
      • Where is the problem? What could be improved to get these features in?
  • Working groups [<5 mins each] [Not discussed live in the meeting]

    • [Knese] Control

    • [Speed] Edge AI

      • recording and meeting minutes
      • Amey Kulkarni at NVIDIA presented new ROS 2 packages for human pose estimation, classification, and object detection being provided as eloquent & foxy cyclonedds Jetson dockers.
        • presentation slides
        • - NVIDIA-AI-IOT/ros2_trt_pose : ROS 2 package for “trt_pose”: real-time human pose estimation on NVIDIA Jetson Platform
        • - NVIDIA-AI-IOT/ros2_deepstream : ROS 2 package for NVIDIA DeepStream applications on Jetson Platforms
        • - NVIDIA-AI-IOT/ros2_torch_trt : ROS 2 packages for PyTorch and TensorRT for real-time classification and object detection on Jetson Platforms
        • - NVIDIA-AI-IOT/ros2_jetson_stats : ROS 2 package for monitoring and controlling NVIDIA Jetson Platform resources
      • Nav2 WG needs help to get optimized Mask R-CNN on Nvidia Jetson or GPUs
        • Nav2 WG needs help getting NVIDIA GPU optimized Mask-RCNN available in ROS 2. Nav2 WG has been working on a navigation pipeline for detection, tracking, and avoidance for some time and this is the last blocking thing to releasing and demos https://github.com/ros-planning/navigation2_dynamic/
        • This is blocking meaningful use of GPUs in navigation.
        • NVIDIA and Arm trying to figure out solution for Nav2 WG

    • [Martin Losa] Embedded

      • micro-ROS Agent now available as a snap package!
      • Arduino news: new features, refactorizations and ports to Arduino Zero and Arduino Due
      • ESP32-S2 port
      • Services migrated to rclc + roadmap for Galactic!
      • Added services and actions to Graph manager
      • Embedded DepthAI - Presentation by Brandon from LUXonis

    • [Coleman] Manipulation

      • Prepping for MoveIt 2 Rolling Ridley release
      • ROS2_Control collaborations between MoveIt and PickNik
      • Alpha UR driver for ROS 2 underway
      • Developing 2021 roadmap for MoveIt 2, let us know what you’re working on!
      • New Cartesian planning functionality nearly ready to be merged in
      • Hybrid planning for MoveIt being built

    • [Macenski] Navigation

      • New speed restricted zone capabilities merged! Docs update and discourse announcement to follow.
      • Working on pure pursuit variant for integration into the stack before year’s end https://github.com/ros-planning/navigation2_tutorials/pull/17
      • Various cleanup leading up to year end to start 2021 with a fresher slate.
      • New first-time user startup guide to be merged before years end on TF/URDF
      • GPS waypoint follower additions being reviewed and likely merged before week’s end Pull requests · ros-navigation/navigation2 · GitHub

    • [Pangercic] Real-time

      • Working on the bench setup for performance testing
      • Executor Design draft

    • [Biggs] Safety

      • Planning two sessions on requirements elicitation and writing in January (1st and 3rd Wednesdays, in our usual meeting slot). Please join if this topic interests you.
      • Have had some discussion about what we could add to REP 2004 regarding requirements.
      • Safety watchdogs library and contracts library are seeing some use, judging from the issue tracker.

    • [Fazzari] Security

      • Exploring a reference security implementation of a moderately complex, fairly independent real-world system.
        • This will be useful as an example for others to follow, as well as a proving ground for NoDL and testing different security policies.
        • Next step is to identify one or more prototypes. Demos scheduled in January for MoveIt and the Robotics Middleware Framework (community invites will be posted to discourse in January)
      • Hosted a discussion on Privaros, A Framework for Privacy-Compliant Delivery Drones.
      • Vulnerability remediation procedure PR approved. This is the workflow for handling vulnerabilities reported through REP 2006, ROS 2 Vulnerability Disclosure Policy.
      • Future meeting minutes have moved to the ros-security community github site.

    • [Blasdel] Tooling

      • Rosbag2
        • Evaluated new LevelDB storage implementation. Sony will contribute and release it from their own repository to avoid adding even more packages to rosbag2 repository - but it looks like a promising option for users. Performance looks good, with a smaller disk footprint than SQLite.
        • New compression multithreading improves data retention in high bandwidth compression use cases
        • We are considering starting a landing page like navigation.ros.org for Tooling maintained projects, most importantly Rosbag2. Question for Steve / TSC: how was access for the “navigation” subdomain granted?
      • CI Actions
        • Deprecation of a GitHub Action core function caused all builds using action-ros-ci to break. The fix process prompted a new release model:
          • All CI actions have been bumped to minor version 0.1.0, which promises a stable API
          • Have started releasing tag “v0.1” in addition to the patch-level tags e.g. “0.1.4” - Consumers can point at tag “v0.1” to receive all patch releases automatically without change to their code so that the roll-out of a fix like this can happen without intervention
        • New known user: ros2_control
      • REP-2005 RCP requests
        • Fix link title for cross_compile by emersonknapp · Pull Request #296 · ros-infrastructure/rep · GitHub (trivial - fix link title for cross-compile)
        • Add libstatistics_collector to REP-2005 by emersonknapp · Pull Request #297 · ros-infrastructure/rep · GitHub
        • Add REP source repository to REP-2005 by emersonknapp · Pull Request #298 · ros-infrastructure/rep · GitHub
        • Add ros-tooling GitHub Action CI to REP-2005 by emersonknapp · Pull Request #299 · ros-infrastructure/rep · GitHub

    • [Woodall] Middleware

      • Agenda, minutes, and further notes:
        • Middleware Working Group - Agenda and Meeting Notes - Google Docs
      • Had a presentation of zenoh-plugin-dds as a bridge across problematic networks.
      • Progress continuing on the Events based Executor proposal from iRobot
      • Review of proof of concept of network flow id’s with FastDDS, from Ericsson and eProsima