Status Update: 2022-07-20

[haixuanTao]

Status update thread.

[haixuanTao]

Meeting 2022-07-20

Finished removing last part of dora-drives dependencies on Pylot

Removedpylot code for dora-drives to be dependance-free, readable and fast alternative.

Message format

• Most refactoring involve switching pylot Python object messages into numpy arrays. This gives the benefit to be easily readable from bytes and to bytes. See: https://github.com/dora-rs/dora-drives/blob/main/nodes/README.md

• This removes the need for pickle. Instead, we have C-order bytes using numpy will reduce message size by a factor ranging from 4 to 20

• Using numpy will enable to easily switch to a more performant matrix library such as jax which is also differiantiable, NVIDIA numpy alternative cuNumeric, etc...

• Using C-order bytes will be readable in all languages, making messages more composable.

Code optimisation

Removed custom implementation with scikit-learn alternative for:

• finding closest vertex
• Measuring distances betwwen 3D object
• Retreiving the depth of a bounding box within a Depth Frame or Lidar Frame.

Follow up action:
Ultimately, we should be looking for a graphic format to handle 2D and 3D object in a language agnostic way that can also be performant, for sorting, projection, and vertex manipulation. This is going to be beneficial if we want dora to handle robotic application. With Yong He, we set up a meeting with Sebastien Crozet to talk about that and integrate within dora-drives starter kit.

Issues left

I'm currently resolving couple of last compatibility issues with the new numpy format in some nodes, complexity that had been hidden within layers of python object code.

[haixuanTao]

Collect Rust shortcomings from Sebastien Crozet.

[haixuanTao]

Adding glommio, monoio and crossbeam into dora-sync-async-examples in preparation for the blog post

• Moved dora-sync-async-examples under dora organisation, with additional documentations.

• added monoio but it cannot function with async-std which is heavily used by zenoh, see: async_std::task::sleep hang the runtime indefinitely bytedance/monoio#85 (comment) , and therefore dora can not work with monoio.

• added glommio but it had some compilation issues that has been fixed. Will try again later but result might be the same that monoio: Failing to compile due to membarrier-rs DataDog/glommio#557 (comment)

• Added crossbeam to dora-sync-async

  • crossbeam however lack many options such as being able to choose the number of threads the sync runtime is going to use.