OSRA TGC meeting minutes for July, 2025

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Back on schedule, here are the meeting minutes for the July 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 will take place in late September, 2025. The minutes of the August meeting should be approved in that meeting and posted publicly shortly thereafter.

TECHNICAL GOVERNANCE COMMITTEE

MEETING MINUTES

24 JULY 2025 / 22:00-23:30 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)
  • Clara Berendsen (Infrastructure PMC Rep, Ekumen)
  • Christian Henkel (Gold Rep, Bosch)
  • Daniel Gordon (Gold Rep, Huawei)
  • David Lu!! (Individual Rep, Metro Robots)
  • Michael Carroll (ROS PMC Interim Lead, Intrinsic)
  • Michael Grey (Open-RMF PMC Lead, Intrinsic)
  • Michel Hidalgo (Silver Rep, Ekumen)
  • Mirko Ferrati (Platinum Rep, Canonical)
  • Sai Kishor (ros-controls PMC Rep, PAL Robotics)
  • Steve Peters (Gazebo PMC Rep, Intrinsic)
  • Steven! Ragnarok (Infrastructure PMC Lead, Intrinsic)
  • Yadunund Vijay (Open-RMF PMC Rep, Intrinsic)

OSRA Observers

  • Leonardo Rossetti (Org Rep, Red Hat)

AGENDA

Geoff Biggs, TGC Chair, called the meeting to order at 22:05 on 24 July 2025 UTC.

Existing Business

  1. Confirmation of minutes of meeting TGC-20250626-Regular

    • Approved by consensus

  2. Project reports

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

      • No formal decisions made this month - a reflection of the end of major decisions around Kilted
      • ROSCon talks - discussed lineup and talks from PMC and TGC members
      • PMC Conversations:
        • Ongoing discussions around promoting lifecycle nodes as the “default” way of doing things in a ROS 2 system.
        • Rolling Ridley updates and discussion, including multiple competing priorities/uses from a core maintainer vs package maintainer vs user perspective; will start Discourse thread
      • Other updates:
        • ros2 doctor improvements via GSoC
        • Python aysncio executor
        • Adding rmw_zenoh to performance tests
        • Early Meson support
        • Architecture work around bazel support
      • Looking forward: L-turtle feature planning

    • Project update: Gazebo (Presented by Addisu Taddese, PMC Lead, on behalf of the Project Lead)

      • Roadmap updates:
        • Migration from Qt5 to Qt6 completed, new migration tutorial available
        • Using Zenoh in gz-transport - support requesting svcs out of order - WIP
        • Command line: use binaries instead of shared libraries
        • Support Bazel for all Gazebo libraries - WIP to enable rendering in Ogre2
        • Download Fuel models on the background.
        • Remove version number from package names - completed
        • Standardized simulation interfaces, working on getting these in for Jetty
      • Other updates:
        • Infra: Auto-releasing Gazebo libs - pilot program starting in gz-transport, Gazebo Jenkins buildfarm upgraded
        • June community meeting
        • Feature freeze for Jetty starting July 25

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

      • Formal Decisions: GPG signing is no longer a PR requirement (was consistently creating friction for first-time contributors)

      • Landed this month:

        • The Site Editor can export simulation-ready SDF worlds, either via GUI or command line (headless)
        • Async execution capabilities merged for rclrs
        • Workflow diagrams can configure and connect message “streams”
          • A “stream” allows an active workflow node to continuously output messages while remaining active.
          • Messages from streams can be connected to other workflow operations, just like a normal output message. This is good for creating a producer/consumer pattern.
        • Workflow activity can be “traced”

      • Ongoing:

        • ReactFlow-based diagram editor supports most operations, currently working on animating the execution trace
        • Timers PR for rclrs is up, waiting on reviews from maintainers
        • Dynamic message introspection for rclrs is in progress
        • Multi-agent path finding visualization feature for site editor is in review
        • Exploring dioxus (reactive GUI framework) as a replacement for egui (immediate mode GUI library) for site editor

      • Future:

        • Prototyping the next generation traffic management interfaces
        • Async action state machines for rclrs
        • Dynamic services and actions for rclrs
        • Implement service/action servers or clients based on IDL message definitions and dynamic loading of typesupport libraries
        • Integrate this into bevy_impulse so workflow nodes can be runtime-configured service or action clients
        • gRPC and protobuf support in workflows

      • Discussion around entry points for learning about the scope of workflows and workflow diagrams.

    • Project update: ROS Controls (Presented by Sai Kishor, PMC Rep)

      • GSoC project is well on track, seems like we’ll have time for stretch goals
        • Further design work on hardware status reporting using existing standards/state machines, e.g. canopen, ethercat, VDA505 states
        • Figuring out GPIO-state publisher
        • Node available in each hardware driver by default now
        • Deprecated “on_init()” API using lots of arguments - use structs now
      • General support from PMC to maintain “urdfdom and friends (maybe robot state publisher/joint state publisher)”
      • Windows support in CI with Pixi
      • Started moving on XML schema definition - use in our parser, moveit setup wizard, etc
      • Discussions around an “ONNX controller”
      • Plans to sideline DynamicJointState and replace with more general dictionary message
      • Discussions on sending full trajectories to robot arms
      • Joint trajectory controller now supports speed scaling, both in-controller and on-robot
      • Work started on embedded support - more on ROSCon workshops

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

      • Completed the migration of the Gazebo Build farm to 24.0.4, was previously done for the ROS and CI Build farms. This is the last big Jenkins instance needed to move up to the latest version of Ubuntu, which gets us to another 5 years of LTD at the community level. Credit to the OSRF Buildfarm team for leading this work.
      • New ROS Infra package releases - bloom release that adds community-contributed support for Mason (close to 1.0 but not quite there), Python 2 support dropped
      • rosdep has a community-contributed command to search the database
      • Colcon maintenance this last month has largely centered around changes to the parallel executor
      • Upcoming:
        • migration of last few auxiliary servers to Ubuntu 24.0.4 - raw snapshot and bootstrap repository servers
        • Getting R Mac machines brought up for Gazebo Buildfarm
        • GSoC project: bringing forward a fork of vcstool (vcs2L)

  3. Other Existing Business Matters

    • Status of SIGs/TCs
      • SIG on Interoperability
        • Chair: Michael Grey
        • Discussed next generation traffic management interface proposal; attendees showed much engagement
      • SIG on Physical AI
        • Chair: Tully Foote (updated by Yadunund Vijay)
        • Went on a recruitment drive, now has 20 members led by many TGC members. A Google group with a mailing list and shared drive for notes, as well as a Discourse category has been created.
        • First meeting will be held on July 31 at 3 pm PT. Agenda includes introductions, SIG goals review, structure feedback and communication best practices.

  • 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

  • None

Other Items/Announcements

  • Announced and welcomed new OSRA members:
    • New Supporting Org member: Botsync
    • New Associate Organization: Austrian Institute of Technology

Adjournment - Geoff Biggs adjourned the meeting at 22:58 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. OSRF management to begin working with PMCs to implement the 2025 funding plan.
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