Autoware Execution and Inspection Tool Improvement

[jerry73204]

The thread raises the discussion on the existing Autoware launch process using ros2launch for now. It does not provide a satisfying user experience as it has several known issues.

• The startup is slow. It spends up to 10~20 seconds to start Autoware on a desktop, and ~40 secs on AGX Orin.
• If the ros2launch is kill by SIGKILL, the belonging nodes become orphans.
• It dumps all logs on the terminal. It's not readable and makes it difficult to locate the issues.

I implemented the play_launch as the alternative to fix issues above. It reduces startup time down to <3 seconds and provides structured logs. Now it's demonstrated to be fully compatible w/ Autoware. For those interested in it, you can check the presentation and videos on the drive. You can also check the videos to see the play_launch capability.

• Full Autoware demo and Web UI walk through
• CPU/GPU/memory profiling
• fast Autoware startup
• immediate Autoware kill

I believe this work can improve the developer experience and see how it can shape the future Autoware runtime. You can check it and give feedback here.

[technolojin]

Thank you for your suggestion and PoC development.

From my side, I have another approach of solving autoware launch issue.
https://github.com/orgs/autowarefoundation/discussions/6760

I think your idea also helps current users. Let's work together.

[chishengshih]

Jerry presented the progress update on play_launch in Reference Design WG meeting on Feb. 27. Here is the slide.

New features:

• Composable node segfault isolation
• Better logging formatting on Web UI
• topic and node navigation
• Runtime parameter listing and modification

[paulsohn]

@jerry73204 @chishengshih

Impressive result. Interestingly, I am working on the exact complementary side: how can we gain insight of the given launcher system as much as possible, check and ensure its integrity, without even launching the nodes or building the packages?

The result of mine is launch-plus #6870 : given launcher system, extract the fully resolved launcher as a single xml file, cloning/building what the launcher actually demands. This is a kickstarting project which barely released v0.1.1.

I am actually interested in some kind of collaboration with play-launch with many subjects, including:

• Verifying whether the resolved result of launch-plus and play-launch agrees with each other
• Providing play-launch as a plugin of execution part of launch-plus: currently launch-plus does not implement an execution part.

How do you think about this project, and the collaboration plan to build a better launcher together? I'd be glad to hear your feedbacks!