Add an Astrobee demo

[mkhansenbot]

An Astrobee simulation already exists based on ROS. We'd need to port to ROS 2 and build it as part of our demos.

[mkhansenbot]

Added to next milestone (proposed) humble-2024.04.0

[Bckempa]

An astrobee port to ros2 in already in-progress upstream which should speed this up: https://github.com/nasa/astrobee/tree/ros2

[ivanperez-keera]

I'd like to propose that we put ideas elsewhere (discussions?) until we agree on "attacking" them. If we use the issues as a brainstorming/idea area, it's going to be super hard for people to know what we are really working on, for us to know what we are really working on, for us to plan each milestone, and for us to know what is broken vs what would be a nice to have.

That's not to say this is not important, it's just a way to manage complexity and facilitate focus. Nothing else.

Over the years, IKOS fell into a similar trap, and we now have issues that cannot be closed because it's not like we will absolutely never ever do anything about them, but they cannot be completed because we don't have the resources. As a result, they just stale indefinitely (the oldest is currently 6 years old; I'm currently trying to solve the problem in IKOS too, but that's a separate story). I've seen projects where this continues growing and gets well into the thousands. It just makes the project absolutely unmanageable in the long term.

To go one step further, I'd propose that, after each release, we open a thread under discussions called "what to work on for release 2024.04.0" (or whichever it is). See, for example: NASA-SW-VnV/ikos#258.

[ana-GT]

I was going to mention this in the last SpaceROS Planning meeting, but it ran out of time: Recently, for an Astrobee-related project, we added some fixes that enabled us to run a couple of Astrobees in ROS2 (rolling) using Gazebo. Specifically, we were able to send motion commands to the Astrobees to move to different locations and take pictures with the NavCam.

We created an issue for this: nasa/astrobee#788 (video shows the astrobees flying around in ROS2) . I was (hopefully) planning to reproduce this using SpaceROS sometime in August, if there is still interest on this item.

[Bckempa]

Hi @ana-GT, as of next week I'll have some time allocated to getting Astrobee SpaceROS ready and will be sure to start with that issue you filed. I'll reach out to you and a few other groups I know are also interested in the conversion for deconfliction to minimize duplicated effort.

[ana-GT]

Just an update regarding this: I think I should have time in the coming weeks to finish the upgrade to ROS2 Jazzy. At the moment, I do have an Astrobee ROS2 setup working fine in Humble (with Gazebo Classic). I still need to convert the astrobee plugins from classic to Harmonic, which is a bit tricky, but not too bad.