ROS 2 TSC Meeting Minutes: 2019-05-16

[gerkey]

ROS 2 TSC Meeting Minutes: 16 May 2019

• Attendees
  • Open Robotics: Tully Foote, Brian Gerkey, Louise Poubel, Dirk Thomas
  • TRI: Allison Thackston
  • LG Electronics: Brian Shin
  • eProsima: Jaime Martin Losa
  • Bosch: Karsten Knese
  • ROBOTIS: Yoonseok Pyo
  • Tier IV: Geoffrey Biggs
  • Acutronic Robotics: Víctor Mayoral Vilches
  • Intel: Matt Hansen
  • Amazon: Rutvik Hora
  • Apex.AI: Dejan Pangercic
• Old business:
  • [2 mins] [Gerkey] ROS trademark update
    • Lawyers preparing application
  • [2 mins] [Gerkey] ROS Elevator Pitch Brochure
    • TSC members to send Brian images to include next week.
    • Brian to do final iteration with designer and be ready to share around time of Dashing release.
  • [2 mins] [Dirk] waffle.io transition
    • We tried GitHub project board for the last two sprints (for the API freeze as well as the feature freeze); pros and cons:
      • (+) The fact that you can place tickets in multiple projects with independent state has proven useful
      • (-) The inability to add tickets from different org units (creating a note with a link to the external ticket as a workaround)
      • (-) The inability to group correlated tickets
      • (-) New tickets aren’t added to the project board until explicitly selected by a maintainer
    • Conclusion: we are not very happy because of the cons and will re-evaluate our options, while limping along in the status quo of no perfect solution.
      • Dejan and Dirk to check with contacts at GitHub on what features can be expected in the future.
    • Alternative idea, raised by Geoff: follow Autoware’s lead and move from GitHub to GitLab, where the project boards have more of what we need. Such a move would be very disruptive, so not something that’s in the cards right now.
  • [5 mins] [Tully / Louise] armhf (32-bit ARM) becoming a Tier 2 supported platform
    • Armhf executors added to ci.ros2.org; manual and nightly jobs are running
      • ~10 test failures in default build
    • REP 2000 updates [PR]
      • Follow-up PR required to update tier status for armhf : Tully
    • Implication for OpenEmbedded as Tier 3?
      • Follow-up for Brian S. to submit PR to add new platform (against this branch).
  • [10 mins] [Gerkey] Dashing release communication plan
    • Review list of demos to come from TSC members
    • Formulate sequence of release-related events
      • Discourse post(s)
      • June 5th meetup
      • Individual company blog & social media posts as you see fit
• New business:
  • (none)
• Standing updates:
  • [15 min] [Dirk / All] Release planning - Dashing update [meta ticket]
    • Open Robotics
      • Action CLI
      • IDL
        1. String (UTF-8), WString (UTF-16)
        2. Python numeric arrays and sequences, performance and memory improvements
      • Intra process communication
        1. Publish only unique ptr vs. value
        2. Only do inter process comm when necessary
        3. Consider intra process subscriber signature
      • Launch
        1. Launching components
        2. Launch-based testing improvements
      • Parameters
        1. Declare parameters explicitly
        2. Read-only flag and value range descriptor
      • Fix memory leak in rclpy
      • Roll out of incremental CI jobs on build.ros2.org (Linux only)
      • Update to FastRTPS (soon to be) 1.8
    • Acutronic Robotics
      • Real-Time
        1. Been working in the ROS 2 Real-Time Quality Assurance Farm
        2. Update at ROS 2 Dashing Diademata · Issue #607 · ros2/ros2 · GitHub
        3. 2-3 weeks of work left until presenting final results
      • Information models
        1. Not much progress to report for now
      • Manipulation
        1. Finalized a first demonstrator with MoveIt 2, more in the WGs discussion below
      • Teaser for ROS 2 Dashing
        1. Prepared small teaser to get input from TSC
    • Amazon
      • QoS features are merged in to mainline. Pending Demo & System tests related PRs: [ROS2 QoS meta-ticket] Dealine, Liveliness, and Lifespan · Issue #680 · ros2/ros2 · GitHub
      • Working on cross-compile support targeting armhf
      • Kicking off work to implement a framework/package that can capture and run ROS2 security attacks: Adds security_testing Proposal by ryanewel · Pull Request #235 · ros2/design · GitHub
      • Asan and Tsan related analysis is complete. Planning to submit a post on discourse with findings and bugs we have fixed so far.
    • Apex.AI
      • launch_testing has been completed: merging with ApexAI/apex_rostest and repository reorganization · Issue #208 · ros2/launch · GitHub.
      • In the last month:
        1. launch_testing has been merged and consolidated into GitHub - ros2/launch: Tools for launching multiple processes and for writing tests involving multiple processes.
        2. existing launch integration tests have been ported
        3. cli for running the integration tests locally has been created
      • Still TBD:
        1. write more documentation than what is here: https://github.com/ros2/launch/tree/master/launch_testing
        2. add some extensions, e.g. GitHub · Where software is built (issues must get migrated to https://github.com/ros2/launch/issues)
      • Regarding performance_testing, William, Michael and Dejan met and came up with the following plan: https://github.com/ros2/ros2/issues/607#issuecomment-465832840.
        • In brief:
          1. we need to extend https://github.com/ApexAI/performance_test to be able to run in the ros2 launch
          2. consolidate output format
          3. we need to automate test runs
          4. we need to figure out reporting and triaging. Apex is deploying a test management suite. Our current front-runner: https://www.qasymphony.com/software-testing-tools/qtest-manager/test-case-management/
    • eProsima
      • 1.8.0 Released. New Features:
        1. Release 1.8.0 · Issue #468 · eProsima/Fast-DDS · GitHub
        2. IDL 4.2
        3. Deadline QoS, Lifespan QoS
        4. Disable positive ACKs
        5. TLS support (secure sockets on TCP transport)
        6. Realtime improvements
           1. Preallocation
           2. Non-Blocking Calls
        7. API improvements
           1. Manual liveliness API (implementation pending for a patch release)
        8. Many bugfixes
      • Not yet tagged, solved minor issues with ROS2 CI
      • Dedicated infrastructure for CI performance tests
      • 1.8.1 planning.
      • Discovery Server Alpha available
    • ROBOTIS
      • Test for ROS 2 Dashing:
        1. LTE and 5G WAN testing using ROS 2 Dashing and DDS
        2. DDS Benchmarking with FastRTPS, Connext, OpenSplice, CycloneDDS, CoreDDS
        3. TurtleBot3 and existing packages
      • Migration and update to ROS 2 Dashing
        1. cartographer package
        2. cartographer_ros package
        3. turtlesim package
        4. ros2arduino package
    • BOSCH
      • Diagnostics:
        1. PRs still waiting for review on upstream repo
        2. Diagnostics-Aggregator is dependent on Bond-core (upstream PR has to be reviewed as well)
      • Micro-ROS:
        1. Work done to work with CMake instead of native nuttx tools
        2. System modes released
      • Realtime Executor:
        1. Paper about realtime analysis (executor model) released by Bosch PhD student
        2. Experiment code available
  • Working group updates:
    • [3 min] [Matt H] Navigation
      • Change nodes to Lifecycle nodes
        1. Adds a lifecycle_manager node
        2. Adds Rviz plugin for startup / shutdown
      • Change from nav2_tasks to rclcpp actions
      • Adding collision checking for recovery behaviors
      • Added parallel planning and control
      • Enabling “rolling window” for local costmap
    • [3 min] [Rutvik] Security
      • Threat model Design Article
      • Working demonstrating example attacks ros2_SecTest in PR
    • [3 min] [Dejan] Real-time
      • Update is posted here: http://discourse.ros.org/t/ros-2-and-real-time/8796/18
      • In brief:
        1. my initial posted attracted interest from Acutronic, Amazon, Bosch, Intel, Ubiquity, Centro Universitario de la Defensa, TierIV, Intel Portland, IIT
        2. First meeting: next Monday
        3. Consensus seems to be that it does not make sense to try to work on the whole HW/SW stack (which also includes ECUs, OSs, Interfaces, ..) but instead to only focus on things like memory management, real-time pub/sub, real-time DDS and tools that allow tracing, profiling and optimizing
    • [3 min] [Geoff] Safety
      • Safety-critical WG - ROS General - Open Robotics Discourse
      • A meeting was held but not well attended (only one other attendee).
      • Some ideas were discussed but due to the lack of attendance no concrete plans were made.
      • Intel missed the meeting but are interested in a future meeting, along with others. Follow up in the thread.
    • [3 min] [Karsten] Embedded
      • No update since last time
    • [3 min] [Víctor] Manipulation
      • QA work
        1. Unit tests ported
        2. moveit_ci ported to ROS 2
        3. Review instructions to help people reproduce our work
      • First demonstrator Minimal proof of concept by ahcorde · Pull Request #71 · AcutronicRobotics/moveit2 · GitHub
      • WG meetings
        1. 1 so far
           1. Minutes https://docs.google.com/document/d/1n34giKHHxUVSuFJ-JVzy4fQQ-lt5WabZtN-DF6wmhFo/edit#
        2. Next is tomorrow
           1. Manipulation WG - May 17, 2019 17:00 CET (9AM PDT, 1AM JST) - #2 by vmayoral - ROS General - Open Robotics Discourse
      • Considering more demonstrators
        1. Things that ROS 2 enables and that weren’t possible with MoveIt!, poll the maintainers and experts
        2. Input?
      • Sync with other WGs
        1. Real-time
        2. Security
• Other:
  • Brian to update calendar time to be more accommodating for members in Europe.