PX4 Maintainers Call: March 21, 2023

:calendar: March 21, 2023

The maintainers meeting is a meeting for the developer team to coordinate on pressing issues and to plan the development of the PX4 Autopilot project, the community is welcome to join and listen, but won’t be able to speak unless specific access is granted ahead of time.

:selfie: Meeting Link

:notebook_with_decorative_cover: Agenda

  • PX4 v1.14.0 Release board update
  • PX4 Documentation & PR sync discussion

:memo: Meeting Notes

PX4 v1.14.0

To maintainers: Could you please add the release (1.14) blocking PR/Issues that must be merged into main before branching out?

TODO

  • We need to clarify the tests needed (RC, etc)
  • DDS testing from users not so familiar with ROS2 & asking for actual use cases
  • Identify use cases of the DDS: Organize another call to discuss this thoroughly (controller interface, offboard control kinda use cases, etc)

PX4 Documentation synchronization discussion

Can we have a more automation on generating documentation?

Daniel: We could have each ‘module’ have a documentation? Being atomically?

Atomic: Means, having the documentation within the source code, so that it is frictionless for having a PR up for a Docs vs Development (as currently).

TODO: Organize meeting with Hamish to discuss about this & what the procedure should be.

Meeting sounds good - it will be amusing to hear someone provide a justification for statements like: “so that it is frictionless for having a PR up for a Docs vs Development (as currently).”

When does it suit people to do this? Who’s going to come? I can do AEST out into evenings.

  • Jay: In MAVROS we used to have a chosen set of messages, how do we do it with XRCE-DDS?"

MAVROS is a layer over MAVLink, which is an agreed and standardized interface layer. When you talk MAVROS you’re talking a standard interface layer, so of you have a chosen set of messages.

uORB is PX4 internal and so it doesn’t have a standard behaviour. You can have a standard, but then you have to define what you mean by that, and what you will allow to break. Is this standard something shared with other drone systems? Who manages it?

FWIW I think having a set of message definitions maintained by ROS that mirror the set supported by MAVLink would be pretty good, but needs flexible management.