stonier
commented
4 years ago Sorry for the delay, I really ought to check in on my emails more frequently!
py_trees / py_trees_ros
@naveedhd was working on slowly backporting some of the more interesting, newly added features of py_trees and py_trees_ros to the ROS1/python2 releases, but I think that's going to be a bit of work to iron out all the details (i.e. will be more than a few cherrypicks) as so much has moved forward.
I would be willing to help with reviewing PR's and answering questions (here, on chat/hangout or even live hacking sessions, I make frequent visits to the stanford area). You'd have to do the hard yards though and I wouldn't be able to support much rigorous testing of it given a lack of ROS1/python2 environments in my workplace. Also, any changes wouldn't be forwarded to the ROS build farm (kinetic or melodic) - these would be API breaks and I suspect that even though it's only a 0.x release, it'd probably affect quite a few users. Happy to maintain a specific release branch on github for them though.
If you want to get started, probably the thing to do is identify the new features that are available and work out what priority order you want to designate for pulling back into a ROS1/python2 world.
py_trees_js / py_trees_ros_viewer
Now a ROS1 version of the viewer using the same js library is probably quite doable. The js library has it's own 'json' specification for the data coming in and that is very compatible with the ROS1 trees. All you'd need to do is create a ROS1 version of py_trees_ros_viewer with it's own custom ROS1 backend (c.f. the ROS2 backend.py) that converts messages into the format that the js library understands. If you're interested in spinning up a version of that, I can help there in making sure the js library has the bugfixes you need (there's always a few very minor problems).
pirobot
We are very excited by all the active development being done here on py_trees, py_trees_ros and py_trees_js. However, we need some advice on how to proceed given our current research environment here at the Stanford AI and Robotics lab.
Virtually all of our robots and desktops are still running ROS Kinetic on Ubuntu 16.04. We do research on a wide variety of fixed arms (Sawyer, Franka, Kinova) and mobile manipulators such as the Toyota HSR, Turtlebot, Fetch and our own custom-built Jackrabbot. However, it appears that most of the development on py_trees and py_trees_ros is being done for Python 3 and ROS 2 environments. My question is what would you suggest is our best strategy for utilizing the latest features of py_trees, py_trees_ros and py_trees_js without doing a lab-wide upgrade of all our robots and computers to ROS 2?
Many thanks!