Status Update: 2023-07-19

[haixuanTao]

Meeting Universities and Enterprise

People met:

• National Taiwan Universities (NTU) and ADLINK
• University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Hefei, Anhui
• ChangAn Car
• Synkroton
• OpenAtom

Key Takeaway:

• dora-rs needs to have a bridge to ROS2 so that it can make transition from ros2 project easier. One of the main pain point of universities is that:
  • Sensors are based on ros2 and transitioning is really hard and very time consuming.
  • University codebase is also already in ROS 2 so its hard for them to pivot entirely.
  • ROS2 Tooling such as RViz and Rosbag are very embedded in the development process of those universities.
    -> But there is a real struggle with ROS2, its build system, its slow communication in Python and the difficulty to scale ROS2 project.

--> See: https://github.com/orgs/dora-rs/discussions/306
--> See: https://github.com/dora-rs/dora-ros2-bridge

• The second point that has been mentioned is that a lot of resources that is currently spent in the R&D of robotic is currently spent on Deep Learning Model, training and evaluation. Therefore, people expect from us to not only be a replacement of ROS2 but also an enabler of Deep Learning model utilization. This can comes dora making integration of new model easier through our dataflow paradigm. But also maybe dora-rs can help in the training process, whether it being zero-shot learning step, pre-training, or end-2-end learning. But, how to implement such featrure is still an open-question

[haixuanTao]

Releasing v0.2.4

--> After having collected feedback on the website and fixed somme bugs. We feel confident in releasing a new dora version and we feel now confident to make a reddit/hn communication to collect even more feedback

[haixuanTao]

dora-hardware

Improving the Ways of working with the Xian Team

[haixuanTao]

-> Moving Orange Pi +

[phil-opp]

Dora <-> Ros2 Bridge

• Many existing projects, drivers, etc depend on ROS2, so a bridge would be useful to ease migration to dora
• Work has started at https://github.com/dora-rs/dora-ros2-bridge
• Approach:
  • Parse ROS2 msg files and auto-generate Rust structs from them (implementation based on rclrust_msg_gen crate)
  • Provide functions to publish and subscribe to ROS2 topics (using ros2-client crate)
  • Don't require a ROS2 installation or using its complex build system.
  • Goal: Users can create custom nodes to publish/subscribe to both ROS2 topics and Dora inputs/outputs -> act as a bridge
• Currently working on Python Bridge
  • Based on Rust bridge
  • Challenges
    • Python package (with its Rust dependencies) is build ahead of time on different machine -> we need to parse the msg files at runtime
    • ROS2 doesn't encode type info in serialized messages, so we need to know type for serialization/deserialization
    • Python does not have a good abstraction for all ROS2 types (e.g. no real structs)
  • Guide serialization using type info generated from parsed msg files -> ensure that correct types are used for serialization (e.g. struct instead of map)
  • For deserialization, we needed to fork the ros2-client and rustdds crates to support DeserializeSeed-based deserialization to runtime types. This way, we could use the type info to guide deserialization too.