2010-12-15 ros_comm meeting notes

During this meeting we brainstormed potential areas to focus on in ROS 1.5. We currently have a project underway at Willow Garage to explore to use of ROS and multiple heterogeneous robots, including low-cost platforms. The main stress of this project is expected to be robust communication over wireless networks. The goal of this project is to provide a "many, cheap robots" theme to the next phase of our development.

This brainstorming document contains much more than is achievable with our limited developer resources. We encourage developers to interested in getting involved to express interest on ros-developers, as well as look at the handoff list.

Notes

General

• Move nodelets into ROS core? This will require stripping down poco.
• Move msg-generation and msg files a ros_msg stack that sits between ros and ros_comm. This stack will enable ROS message data structures to be used independently of ROS communication code.

ROS Master

• Redis-backend for Master data
• TTL in registration protocol so that registrations expire
• New 'global' name spec that would allow master referencing in multiple master scenarios

rospy

• Polled topics
• UDP, mUDP
• Better abstraction of the transport interface so that new transports can easily be tested

roscpp

• Polled topics
• Better UDP: alternate UDP transports to handle other UDP use cases (increased bandwidth, transport of larger messages, etc...).
• mUDP
• Removed Message base class

roslaunch

• 'lite' specification format in YAML
• Network API
• Finish Python API for launching in-process.
• Resurrect roslaunch-console/'rostop' prototype using network API.