Here are the meeting minutes for the December regular meeting of the Technical Governance Committee, held on the 4th of December, 2025. You can find the official minutes in the repository, as well as a Markdown version below. The PDF version is the official version.
TECHNICAL GOVERNANCE COMMITTEE
MEETING MINUTES
4 December 2025 / 22:00-23:30 UTC / VIRTUAL VIA ZOOM
ATTENDEES
OSRF:
- Geoff Biggs (TGC Chair)
- VM (Vicky) Brasseur (OSRA Governance Advisor)
- Vanessa Yamzon Orsi (TGC Secretary)
- Kat Scott (Developer Advocate)
OSRA Delegates/TGC Reps:
- Clara Berendsen (Infrastructure PMC Rep, Ekumen)
- Michael Carroll (ROS PMC Interim Lead, Intrinsic)
- Alejandro Cordero (ROS PMC Rep, Honu Robotics)
- Tully Foote (Platinum Rep, Intrinsic)
- Daniel Gordon (Gold Rep, Huawei)
- Michael Grey (Open-RMF PMC Lead, Intrinsic)
- Michel Hidalgo (Silver Rep, Ekumen)
- David Lu!! (Individual Rep, Metro Robots)
- Bence Magyar (ros-controls PMC Lead, Locus Robotics)
- Steve Peters (Gazebo PMC Rep, Intrinsic)
- Steven! Ragnarök (Infrastructure PMC Lead, Intrinsic)
- Hemal Shah (Platinum Rep, NVIDIA)
- Addisu Taddese (Gazebo PMC Lead, Intrinsic)
- Yadunund Vijay (Open-RMF PMC Rep, Intrinsic)
OSRA Observers
- Scott Logan (Incoming Infrastructure PMC Lead, Intrinsic)
- Tom Panzarella (Seegrid)
- Leonardo Rossetti (Red Hat)
- Todd Sutton (Zachry Corporation)
AGENDA
Geoff Biggs, TGC Chair, called the meeting to order at 22:07 on 4 December 2025 UTC.
Existing Business
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Confirmation of minutes of meeting TGC-20251023-Regular
- Approved by consensus
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Project reports
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Project update: ROS (Presented by Michael Carroll, Project Leader)
- Formal decisions:
- New mentee Committer, Michael Carlstrom.
- New full PMC Member: Miguel Company (eProsima).
- New working group founded: ROS Graph, lead by Emerson Knapp.
- Meeting time changed to accommodate daylight savings changes in several locations.
- PMC Members noted that conversations at ROSCon 2025 have shifted towards future-looking tasks, such as improved packaging and distribution, and scaling ROS deployments.
- An informal hackathon held after ROSCon was of high value. Considering a World ROS Hackathon day or similar.
- From the ROSCon workshop, issues around LLMs being used as a source of information more than documentation, and conceptual gaps around fundamentals such as environment variables and file systems. These need addressing.
- For 2026 funding round, the PMC is considering work to improve CI times, improving typesupport performance, and a portable message generation tool.
- Formal decisions:
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Project update: Gazebo (Presented by Addisu Taddese, Project Leader)
- Formal decisions:
- Meeting time changed to accommodate daylight savings changes in several locations.
- The sdformat.org website has been changed to a statically generated site and deployed on GitHub Pages, reducing infrastructure costs.
- Held a hackathon at Intrinsic to explore high-effort features:
- Rendering quality improvements.
- System plugin isolation.
- MuJoCo physics engine plugin.
- The PMC has decided to use Bevy (a game engine implemented in Rust) for future rendering development.
- System plugin isolation will also enable running external code, such as controllers, in lock-step with the simulation.
- Formal decisions:
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Project update: Open-RMF (Presented by Michael Grey, Project Leader)
- Formal decisions:
- None
- Most effort has gone into writing a handbook to teach CrossFlow.
- Formal decisions:
-
Project update: ros-controls (Presented by Bence Magyar, Project Leader)
- Formal decisions:
- New mentee PMC Member: Marq Rasmussen.
- Discovered a real-time issue with rclcpp_lifecycle state access; a fix is being worked on.
- “Dynamic joint states” will soon be non-default in Rolling.
- Working on tensor types and an ONNX controller demo for Physical AI.
- Taking on the mujoco ros2_control library from NASA is moving again after the US government shutdown ended.
- Formal decisions:
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Project update: Infrastructure (Presented by Steven! Ragnarök, Project Leader)
- Formal decisions:
- None
- The team, lead by Clara, spent time dealing with the annual fallout of Black Friday and Cyber Monday on AWS spot instance pricing.
- Assisted with the sdformat.org move, and analysing build time differences between different buildfarms.
- Two new contributors have been picked up from ROSCon.
- Formal decisions:
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As he steps down from the Infrastructure PMC, the TGC expresses its gratitude to Steven! Ragnarök for many years of hard work leading the OSRF’s infrastructure efforts.
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Other Existing Business Matters
- Status of SIGs/TCs
- SIG on Interoperability
- Chair: Michael Grey
- In November, Xi-yu from the Open-RMF PMC gave a tutorial on using the new site editor.
- In December, Andre from OTTO by Rockwell presented work being done at the ISO on standardising interoperability communication.
- SIG on Physical AI
- Chair: Tully Foote and Yadunund Vijay
- Working on 3-, 6- and 9-month roadmaps on integrating Physical AI into ROS. These will be publicly posted shortly.
- SIG on Interoperability
- Status of SIGs/TCs
New Business
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Standardized interface for inference (Tully Foote and Yadu Vijay)
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The SIG on Physical AI has identified a repeating pattern of an inference model being used. The SIG would like to see the definition of a standard interface for inputs and outputs for inference, and to see the generation of adapters from ROS messages to Tensor representations. The SIG would like to make a call to the broader user community for collaboration and contributions from anyone interested in this topic.
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High efficiency transport for hardware specific memory data storage (Tully Foote and Yadu Vijay)
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The SIG on Physical AI has identified the need to enable zero-copy transfer of content in hardware-specific memory (e.g. AI accelerator hardware) via alternative DMA transfers. This will require cooperation from the various accelerated processing vendors. The SIG is suggesting that this work be done under the coordination of a new Working Group created by the ROS PMC, and would like the TGC to request that the ROS PMC form such a Working Group with the goal of getting this work done in time for the Lyrical release.
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Both the ROS Project Leader and NVIDIA are in support of this proposal. NVIDIA in particular can bring resources to this work, and is working on a prototype already.
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NVIDIA wants this work to proceed while ensuring it does not break fundamental design principles, and having input from the ROS PMC would help with this.
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NVIDIA wants this work to be accelerator vendor agnostic, which requires other accelerator vendors to get involved, and a ROS PMC Working Group is an ideal way to achieve that.
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Tully moves to request the ROS PMC to form a Working Group for implementing efficient transfer of hardware-specific memory data (name to be decided).
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Vicky seconds the motion.
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None opposed.
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Motion is carried by consensus.
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ROS Bounties and developer burn-out
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The TGC discussed the various viewpoints on offering bounties for feature development and bug fixes using OSRA funds, and viewpoints on developer burn-out in the open-source software world, as well as the relationship between these two.
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It was noted that reviewing PRs is the most significant bottleneck in our projects, and community members need to be encouraged to take on more of the PR reviewing burden so the core maintainers can focus on the areas that need their expertise.
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Some good ideas were raised that the OSRF management will investigate further.
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Adjournment - Geoff Biggs adjourned the meeting at 23:32 UTC.
ACTION ITEMS
- The meeting minutes will be circulated to the TGC for review and approval before the next meeting by the TGC Chair.
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