OSRA TGC meeting minutes for August, 2025

OSRA Announcements and News
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It didn’t take long to fall off the schedule again, but here are the meeting minutes for the August regular meeting of the Technical Governance Committee, held on the 28th of August, 2025. You can find the official minutes in the repository, as well as a Markdown version below. The PDF version is the official version.

The next TGC meeting took place just prior to ROSCon 2025, in October, and the next upcoming meeting is in December. The minutes of the October meeting should be approved in the December meeting and posted publicly shortly thereafter. I hope.

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TECHNICAL GOVERNANCE COMMITTEE

MEETING MINUTES

28 AUGUST 2025 / 15:00-16:30 UTC / VIRTUAL VIA ZOOM

ATTENDEES

OSRF:

  • Brian Gerkey (OSRF Board Chair)
  • Geoff Biggs (TGC Chair)
  • Kat Scott (Developer Advocate)
  • Vanessa Yamzon Orsi (TGC Vice-Chair/Secretary)
  • VM (Vicky) Brasseur (OSRA Governance Advisor)
  • Yuki Nakagawa (OSRF Board Member)

OSRA Delegates/TGC Reps:

  • Addisu Taddese (Gazebo PMC Lead, Intrinsic)
  • Alejandro Cordero (ROS PMC Rep, Honu Robotics)
  • Bence Magyar (ros-controls PMC Lead, Locus Robotics)
  • Christian Henkel (Gold Rep, Bosch)
  • Clara Berendsen (Infrastructure PMC Rep, Ekumen)
  • David Lu!! (Individual Rep, Metro Robots)
  • Hemal Shah (Platinum Rep, NVIDIA)
  • Michael Carroll (ROS PMC Interim Lead, Intrinsic)
  • Michael Grey (Open-RMF PMC Lead, Intrinsic)
  • Michel Hidalgo (Silver Rep, Ekumen)
  • Steve Peters (Gazebo PMC Rep, Intrinsic)
  • Steven! Ragnarök (Infrastructure PMC Lead, Intrinsic)
  • Tully Foote (Platinum Rep, Intrinsic)
  • Yadunund Vijay (Open-RMF PMC Rep, Intrinsic)

OSRA Observers

  • Adam Dabrowski (Robotec.ai)
  • Christophe Bédard (Apex.AI)
  • Leonardo Rossetti (Red Hat)
  • Nick Hehr (Viam)
  • Todd Sutton (Zachry Corporation)
  • Tom Panzarella (Seegrid)

AGENDA

Geoff Biggs, TGC Chair, called the meeting to order at 15:04 on 28 August 2025 UTC.

Existing Business

  1. Confirmation of minutes of meeting TGC-20250724-Regular

    • Approved by consensus

  2. Project reports

    • Project update: ROS (Presented by Michael Carroll, PMC Lead)

      • No formal decisions made this month.
      • PMC conversations:
        • Two potential new committers in the pipeline.
        • An interesting proposal from Hemal/NVIDIA for a native tensor type in ROS. Still being discussed.
        • Localization of the ROS documentation has been under discussion recently, with a community member starting their own localization effort.
      • Lyrical Luth feature planning is still ongoing.

    • Project update: Gazebo (Presented by Addisu Taddese, PMC Lead)

      • No formal decisions made this month.
      • PMC conversations:
        • Two new committers in the pipeline, but been delayed by the impending Gazebo Jetty release.
      • Gazebo Jetty reached its feature freeze this week, and the tutorial party has kicked off.
      • Trying two new things for this release’s tutorial party:
        • Kat has set up a Luma registration page for the kick-off meeting.
        • Kat has set up a points system for issues, to account for the differing difficulty of the various issues.
      • Roadmap updates:
        • Gazebo support for Zenoh is nearly at parity with 0MQ.
        • Bazel support continues to improve, with several dependencies added to the Bazel Central Repository. Gazebo without the GUI is generally working via Bazel.
        • Parallel download of assets from Fuel is complete, so there is no longer a stall on startup.

    • Project update: Open-RMF (Presented by Michael Grey, PMC Lead)

      • Landed this month:

        • Proof-of-concept visual editor for workflow diagrams.
        • Many UX improvements in the site editor. Almost at parity with the 1st generation traffic editor.

      • Ongoing:

        • Visual tracing of workflow execution.

    • Project update: ros-cntrols (Presented by Bence Magyar, PMC Lead)

      • Formally accepted a policy on releases, versioning and public API declaration, with an emphasis on safety-critical fixes.
      • Formally decided to take over mj_ros2_control from PickNik.
      • PMC conversations:
        • GSoC project has gone very well. The student completed all goals, including the stretch goals.
        • Started work on an XML schema definition; will be used in our own parser, the MoveIt setup wizard, and similar places.
        • Added a bunch of new messages to report hardware status to control_msgs
        • Discussing adding support for “controller bundles” to ease bring-up and take-down of collections of controllers in a coordinated manner.

    • Project update: Infrastructure (Presented by Steven! Ragnarök, PMC Lead)

      • First official release of vcs2l, the replacement for vcstool, which includes a number of fixes that were sent upstream by the community and never merged.
        • GSoC student who did this work is planning to stay on as a maintainer. They are being mentored to become a Committer.
      • Having problems with LLM scraper bots going after our Jenkins instances, which are public to support contributors. This is effectively causing a denial of service attack. Rate limiting and caching of expensive operation results has been added to mitigate this, and watching to see how these go before applying additional mitigations.
      • Mac support in the Gazebo build farm is up just in time for the Jetty release.

  3. Other Existing Business Matters

    • Status of SIGs/TCs
      • SIG on Interoperability
        • Chair: Michael Grey
        • Still continuing discussions on the next generation traffic management interface proposal. Probably one more session to go.
      • SIG on Physical AI
        • Chair: Tully Foote
        • SIG is off to an excellent start. Now up to 24 members, with a few more potentially onboarding soon.
        • Currently working on defining narrow focus areas where the group should concentrate its efforts. In particular, looking at standardized interfaces and messages, the data collection pipeline, the training and execution pipeline, and, tentatively, embodiment. This is about 6 people per focus area.

  • TGC 2025 Funding Round Disbursement

    • A proposal has been made on how to disburse the $250K for this initial funding round that was provided by the OSRF.

      Item 1: Fund work to enable use of Cargo-provided dependencies in the buildfarm with the goal of enabling software built on the buildfarm to depend on external software written in Rust and distributed via Cargo.

      Although the proposal specifically mentions ROS packages using Rust, other OSRA projects will also benefit from the ability to start using Rust, giving this funding broad impact across all projects.

      Item 2: Fund documentation improvements for the remainder of 2025

      This item is to combine the ROS, Gazebo, Open-RMF and ros-controls PCMs’ proposals for documentation improvements, with some modifications.

  • ros-2025-1 ROS 2 Documentation Information Architecture Overhaul

  • gazebo-2025-3 Zero-To-Reinforcement-Learning with Gazebo Manual

  • open-rmf-2025-2 Establish a project-level landing page and online documentation book

  • ros-controls-2025-1 Extension and Restructuring of ros2_control documentation

    • Discussions continued on the proposal and the proposed funding items, the best approach for focusing this tranche of funding, plans for unfunded proposals, and items for improvement in the process for the next round of funding.

      • Approved by consensus.

      • Next steps: OSRF management to begin working with PMCs to implement this funding plan.

New Business

  • Transferring maintenance of URDF & robot_state_publisher from ROS PMC to ros-controls PMC

    • After discussion over the past couple of months, both PMCs are now happy to proceed with the transfer. Looking for a decision by the TGC whether this move can go forward.

      • Discussion around the importance of URDF beyond just ROS, the large number of URDFs in the wild, and the need to avoid breaking them. Any changes to the URDF specification should not break existing URDFs, so the TGC would like maintenance under ros-controls to continue in this way.

      • Discussion on the benefit of this move to the ROS PMC in reducing its maintenance burden.

      • Moved by Bence Magyar, Seconded by Michael Carroll. Approved by Consensus.

    • Update on TGC 2025 Funding Round Disbursement from the TGC Chair

      • Cargo-in-the-build-farm work is down to a short list of two vendors; working on getting quotes and expect to make a decision soon.

      • Documentation writing work is down to five potential vendors; working on meeting each to discuss the proposed work.

    • ROS Lyrical Luth Roadmap

      • In-depth discussion amongst the TGC members about the potential features to include in ROS Lyrical Luth, due for release in 2026. Full support Bazel is planned to be a major feature, although it is still a herculean effort to achieve; the Bazel Central Repository has been a huge help here. Bazel support will ease things like thread sanitization. The Events Executor is also seeing a major improvement. However many desired roadmap items still don’t have a committed contributor, so help is wanted.

Other Items/Announcements

  • Announced and welcomed new OSRA members:
    • New Silver member: Netatech
    • New Supporting Organization member: Fiction Lab

Adjournment - Geoff Biggs adjourned the meeting at 16:30 UTC.

ACTION ITEMS

  1. The meeting minutes will be circulated to the TGC for review and approval before the next meeting by the TGC Chair.

  2. ROS and ros-controls PMCs to work on moving the agreed repositories.

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