Autonomy Software WG Meeting 2022/05/17

[BonoloAWF]

Administrative

• Previous Meeting Minutes

Attendees

Chaired by Fatih

• Armagan
• Ahmet
• Ambroise
• Berkay K
• Beyza
• Bonolo
• David
• Esteve
• Fatih
• Hatem
• JianKang
• Goktug
• Kaan
• Luca
• Mark
• Mehmet
• Piotr
• Rama
• Ryohsuke
• Sugwan
• Xinyu
• Zeynep

Common Resources

• Bus ODD software architecture proposal
• Bus ODD architecture design discussions
• Bus ODD candidate simulator comparisons
• Bus ODD milestone development plan
• Autoware contributors list

Announcements

Fatih created an S3 bucket for hosting Autoware files. The collected data will be kept in one place.

Autoware.Auto

• Updates on bug fixes and documentation bugs
• Release of Autoware.Auto v2.0.0

Autoware.Universe

• Bus ODD issues
• Autoware.Universe reported bugs
• Autoware design discussions and demos

Discussion topics

Proposed by Kenji:

• I'd like to discuss the transition strategy from ROS 2 Galactic to Humble (at this meeting and also at the next TSC).
  I'll summarize the status (Support rolling(humble) autoware.universe#268) into several slides, so I want to get feedback from Bus ODD members about their requirements for the transition.
  For example, "When can the vehicle's OS be updated to 22.04?" in order to determine the support timeline.

Summary of the presentation from Ryohsuke:

• ROS Humble will be released in May and Galactic will EOL in Nov 2022. Foxy lacks significant features compared to Galactic so we aim to move to Humble before November.
• TierIV is investigating the API changes in Rolling
• Proposal is to complete evaluation by July/Aug and switch the main distro thereafter (Sep - Nov)
• Action items include converting all APIs to Humble, determining the criteria for evaluating Humble to ensure no regression, determining the date for switching the main distro, preparing Docker images for each distro, and supporting releasing vendor packages.
• Galactic support will eventually be removed from the main branch
• Moving to Humble requires upgrading to Ububntu 22.04 LTS

Fatih(F) - does Galactic work in Ubuntu 22.04? Ryohsuke (R) - I'm not sure but you may need to install from source. F - I expect the transition to be short and maintenance support to be minimal given not many are using Universe in production. R - Yes. Engineers from TierIV will work on the Humble transition. Xinyu (X) - ROS has a new release every year so are we going to move to another release next year too? The migration will take half a year so it should only be done for significant improvements. R - LTS is released every 2 years and other releases are done annually. We have to move to Humble since Galactic is EOL. We don't see any critical features for Galactic to Humble so we can skip the next short term release if feature improvements are not significant.

Proposed by Ryohsuke:

• I also have additional topic about having a monthly release of autoware for ease of testing.
  The idea is that we will have a release branch in the https://github.com/autowarefoundation/autoware repository with a repos file pointing to a certain commit hash at certain point in time. We will run the CI against the branch to make sure that it doesn't have a build failure and also make sure that it passes a minimal set of driving scenarios using scenario simulator.

Ryohsuke (R) - we have been releasing at the end of each ODD project which is too slow for users who want to test Autoware. We should rather do monthly releases which will be more stable. Fatih (F) - most of the labour intensive part will be changing the .repos file to replace main with the actual commit hashes. Writing a script to automate this would be helpful. R - Yes, there is a function that can auto generate this. The naming could be as simple as 01beta, 02beta... F- a Github action script would have this. R - This would be monthly snapshot rather than monthly feature releases.

Proposed by Fatih:

Everyone to review the vehicle interface docs:

• vehicle interface has a gate (switch between joystick or control stack)
• adapter translates the control commands to a target actuation command expected by the vehicle (eg. specific vehicle protocol or the low level acceleration, brake steering etc.)
• brake map calibrator creates a mapping from pedal level to acceleration

Action Items

1. @xmfcx to create an issue to test the existing lidar-only perception pipeline with the data provided Collect raw sensor data to test sensor drivers autoware.universe#562 (comment)

Review of Issues and Discussions

The following Discussions and Issues were highlighted:

• Correct points2image dependency #229 - there is an issue with post-processing of detections. It could be a scaling issue related to the bounding boxes. Fatih created an issue and assigned it to Kaan to investigate further.
• The output of the gnss_poser package is not suitable for ekf autoware.universe#800 - in progress, the required msgs will be generated within autoware_sensing_msgs
• https://github.com/autowarefoundation/autoware.universe/issues/678 - moved to documentation repo
• Finalize the field type for pointcloud autoware.universe#563 - raw velodyne output can be sent over the network (but not as ROS msgs)
• Map Based Prediction Incorrect Predictions autoware.universe#494 - in progress

[kenji-miyake]

@BonoloAWF @xmfcx cc @mitsudome-r Hi, I'd like to discuss the transition strategy from ROS 2 Galactic to Humble (at this meeting and also at the next TSC).

I'll summarize the status (autowarefoundation/autoware.universe#268) into several slides, so I want to get feedback from Bus ODD members about their requirements for the transition.
For example, "When can the vehicle's OS be updated to 22.04?" in order to determine the support timeline.

Thank you. 🙇

[mitsudome-r]

Here's the slide that I used today:
Transition strategy to ROS 2 Humble.pdf

[mitsudome-r]

I also have additional topic about having a monthly release of autoware for ease of testing.
The idea is that we will have a release branch in the https://github.com/autowarefoundation/autoware repository with a repos file pointing to a certain commit hash at certain point in time. We will run the CI against the branch to make sure that it doesn't have a build failure and also make sure that it passes a minimal set of driving scenarios using scenario simulator.

Comment from itri-bus channel in Discord.

Bonolo
Universe is actively under development so it is a bit tricky to get stable packages. M. Fatih Cırıt (AWF) Xinyu Wang(TIER IV) do you have any suggestions on how Brian Lin (ITRI-U300) could proceed? Does universe have a pre-release branch perhaps which is a bit more stable than main?

Xinyu Wang(TIER IV)
Bonolo, Brian Lin (ITRI-U300), Hi Bonolo, Brian. Unfortunately, we do not have a well-tested version for release. I've talked to Mitsudome-san Ryohsuke Mitsudome about the issue and he will be proposing to have this featured release on a monthly basis during the Software Working Group Meeting this week. For now, please use the current master or (make a fork perhaps) as we have not seen major issues with it.