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Open-Source Project for MPEG-5 EVC (Essential Video Coding) The COVID-19 outbreak has changed our lives and relationships over the past year. We now have no other choice but to communicate more often through the Internet. One of the key technologies for talking via the Internet is, definitely, video compression (coding) technology. However, a very old codec, H.264/AVC, is still the primary technology used in video conference applications, whose standardization was finalized about 20 years ago. Experts had undoubtedly developed a more efficient video codec called HEVC, but it is not dominantly available yet because of its complex license policy or computational complexity issues for video conferences.In June 2021, Samsung Research released an open-source video encoder (XEVE: eXtra-fast Essential Video Encoder, https://github.com/mpeg5/xeve) and decoder (XEVD: eXtra-fast Essential Video Decoder, https://github.com/mpeg5/xevd), which are software implementations of the state-of-the-art video coding standard, MPEG-5 Essential Video Coding (EVC), providing better visual quality for video calls and alleviating the expensive royalty for video codecs.The EVC standard completed by the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) in April 2020 defines two profiles: (1) the Baseline profile, which is royalty-free as it only consists of technologies that are more than 20 years old, and (2) the Main profile, which contains enhanced tools to improve the compression efficiency. At an equivalent level of visual quality, the Baseline and Main profiles save bit rate by approximately 40% compared to the H.264/AVC and HEVC standards, respectively. For your reference, HEVC saves approximately 40% of the bit rate compared to H.264/AVC.The main purpose of our source code release is to make the MPEG-5 EVC standard more widely and easily used in the industry. For example, the high-performance, commercial-ready, open-source encoder XEVE can be directly deployed to over-the-top (OTT) services without additional development and enable high-quality encoding of video contents. XEVD, a lightweight, open-source decoder, can be directly deployed on embedded devices such as smartphones to play video streams from OTT services. Moreover, XEVE and XEVD can provide improved visual quality and cost-efficient delivery for real-time video conference services, and we believe these services will continue to be popular even after the pandemic.In addition to this effort, Samsung has been striving to adopt the Baseline profile of EVC into the WebRTC standard for real-time video communication on web browsers and mobile applications. Its integration to the WebRTC standard shall prompt better experiences on virtual video communication at a lower cost.* Original Contents : https://research.samsung.com/news/Open-Source-Project-for-MPEG-5-EVC-Essential-Video-Coding July 23, 2021
Engineering Lead at Samsung Research Wins Multiple Top Awards in Robotics Community Samsung Research America’s Open-Source Robotics, Engineering Lead Steve Macenski was awarded by the global Robot Operating System (ROS) community top awards at the 2021 ROS Developer’s Day conference. This is the second year in a row Samsung Research has received awards from the robotics community.Steve Macenski was awarded, for the second consecutive year, the Top Developer Award for his on-going contributions to ROS and ROS2. He is the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) representative for Samsung and leads the community Navigation Working Group. As a core leader in ROS, he focuses on building highly reliable mobile robotics technology, community engagement, and mentorship. This award highlights his continued technical achievements in the field of robotics, including mapping, path planning, control, and architectural innovations. It also speaks to the success of his leadership in building a vibrant community. Steve’s initiatives have resulted in a community containing hundreds of developers, mentoring opportunities, and hundreds of contributions to high impact projects.Further, the community project, Nav2 (formerly known as Navigation2) was awarded the Top Software Award. This project is led by Steve Macenski of Samsung Research America with close collaboration with Alexey Merzlyakov of Samsung Research Russia. This project aims to provide the highest quality mobile robot navigation solution in the world. Today, it supports Ackermann, Differential Drive, Omnidirectional, and Legged robots with a wide range of sensing capabilities. In the last year, innovations in filters, path planning, control, and behavior trees have been made, which are enabling the next generation mobile robots. It is being used by dozens of companies, researchers, and hobbyists all over the world.Samsung Research’s Open Source Group is a leader in the next generation of robotics technology. They focus on developing the missing technologies holding back new and innovative applications of robotics. Further, this work is made to be well documented with guides and tutorials such that they can be easily integrated into any project. This focus on education and community has earned a strong reputation for Samsung in the ROS community. “[Steve’s] work for educational purposes and attitude in promoting robotics are very valuable and remarkable.” said Markus Buchholz, Principle Software Engineer at Canrig Robotics, “Frankly speaking and open minded [people] … help others to grow and live better.”* Original Contents : https://research.samsung.com/news/Engineering-Lead-at-Samsung-Research-Wins-Multiple-Top-Awards-in-Robotics-Community July 23, 2021
Samsung Electronics Adopts International Open Source Standard Samsung Electronics today announced the adoption of OpenChain ISO (International Organization for Standardization) / IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) 5230:2020, the first international standard for open source compliance. The company joins a growing community of companies in the field of consumer electronics, automotive, cloud computing and telecommunications in using this standard to manage supply chains. The OpenChain Project began in 2016 as an initiative of the Linux Foundation, a non-profit organization in the United States. It aims to establish an effective and consistent open source compliance system. The OpenChain Project was adopted as an ISO / IEC international standard in 2020. The project evaluates each company’s open source compliance capabilities and grants certification if they met the criteria. “Samsung Electronics leads the adoption and use of open source technology to create innovative products,” said Seungbeom Choi, Executive Vice President and Head of R&D Strategy Team at Samsung Electronics. “Underlying this are organizations and processes specifically established to safely and efficiently utilize open source. Our adoption of OpenChain ISO 5230 reflects our ongoing commitment to excellence in our field. Samsung Electronics is expected to enhance its credibility by receiving recognition for its capacity to utilize open source through this certification. We look forward to collaborating with other industry leaders around this standard.” “Open source provides an unmatched platform for innovation,” said Shane Coughlan, General Manager of OpenChain. “To get the most out of this platform, the key is to have effective, efficient processes. OpenChain ISO 5230 delivers this for license compliance activities. We are delighted to welcome Samsung Electronics to our community of conformance. Their leadership in this area will help accelerate our mission throughout the supply chain.” Since 2012, Samsung Research, Samsung Electronics’ advanced R&D hub that leads the development of future technologies for its consumer product business, has been conducting various activities for safe and efficient use of open source with specialized organizations and systems. The company has established a global integrated open source policy with global research institutes, and established a system to identify open source licenses and comply with obligations at the stage of development from software planning to implementation and verification, and have operated online / offline education programs to enhance the understanding of developers.* Original Contents : https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-electronics-adopts-international-open-source-standard July 16, 2021
[Upcoming event] SOSCON Global India Virtual Open Source Conference (5G, IoT and Edge Computing) :Date: 3rd July 2021Time 8.30 am to 2 pm (IST), 12:00 pm to 5:30 pm(KST)Link to Register : http://bit.ly/ComSoc_July3 Fast emerging technologies such as 5G, IoT, and Edge Computing are changing the landscape of the technology industry and bringing significant value to end consumers. At the same time, open-source platforms are rapidly evolving and playing an important role in meeting the agile demands of the industry. Join us to learn from the industry-leading experts on the value, innovation, and benefits of deploying emerging technologies using open source platforms.You will also learn how to develop and deploy Kubernetes Operator, LF Home Edge and O-RAN SC XApp through developer sessions. June 17, 2021
Open Source Kubernetes for the next level of network virtualization We as Samsung Research have recently presented a research achievement as a global team work with Samsung R&D Institute Poland and Samsung Research America for improving the Kubernetes open source project into the next level of competency in IEEE INFOCOM 2021.What is a background of this research?Container technology has revolutionized the way software is being packaged and run. The telecommunications industry, now challenged with the 5G transformation, views containers as the best way to achieve agile infrastructure that offers high throughput and low latency for 5G edge applications. These challenges make optimal scheduling of performance-sensitive workflows a matter of emerging importance.How to solve this? Do not worry, we have Kubernetes open source project!Kubernetes is a de-facto standard open source project for container orchestration in IT industries and has been deployed to various cloud solutions including AWS, Google, Microsoft, IBM, VMWare, and so on. It is now in Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) of Linux Foundation, and is a very dynamic project since over 400 commits are being contributed to it every month. Samsung is also contributing various ideas into this project with a collaboration with community members.Okay, we have an open source which is free, but is that enough? It is not so simple.It is only logical that there are also many new capabilities in the scheduling area. Grabowski and Tyczynski described Kubernetes scheduler and its features available as of Kubernetes v1.16 [1]. It is able to execute the same decision tree policy as Google’s Borg does with the proper configuration [2], but it is not the default choice in Kubernetes, so it requires additional operator’s intervention to activate it. Several improvements have been proposed to Kubernetes scheduler to make it more suitable for public cloud, but they are not considering any network metrics, or examining any inter-application relations and node communication delays, or requiring information about the service function chains that is provided manually, which are all crucial in most of telecommunication use cases in terms of high throughput, low latency orchestration operated in a fully automated manner.In addition, the most critical drawback of the existing scheduler enhancement proposals is their incompatibility to the default scheduler of Kubernetes. No matter how excellent the proposed scheduler guarantees, it requires a custom configuration of selectively activating that scheduler for a specific use case – this is a huge blocker in the telecommunication industry in terms of wide deployment of the scheduler solution. When you consider of realizing the better world of technologies with your great idea using open source like Kubernetes, the most important criteria is its generality of deployment in various use cases that in the end should also guarantee compatibility to the existing open source mainstream.So what have we been researching and developing for general deployment of the industries?We design and implement NetMARKS – Kubernetes scheduler extender that uses information collected by Service Mesh to schedule pods based on current network metrics. Our solution does not conflict with current Kubernetes scheduler plugins or other extenders, and it can be used simultaneously with them to ensure backward compatibility. NetMARKS can automatically discover inter-application relations as well as schedule the application in a way to save the inter-node network bandwidth and to reduce the application response delay by extending the default Kubernetes scheduler including network metrics awareness, to ensure an efficient placement of Service Function Chains (SFCs). In this context, we propose a novel approach to collect network metrics for the scheduler using Istio Service Mesh.Kubernetes for a baseline scheduler, but what is Istio and how it works in NetMARKS?Istio has a sidecar-based service mesh design as shown in Fig. 1. This architecture assumes that there is an adjacent container, as a sidecar for every application that acts as a proxy and intercepts all the network traffic. Istio uses a powerful proxy named Envoy [3]. It provides multiple functionalities including mutual TLS, L3/L4 traffic filtering, HTTP L7 filtering and routing, telemetry, and advanced load balancing with circuit breaking and automatic retries. To benefit from those features, Envoy Proxy has to be configured properly and has to be provided with certificates. This is done by istiod, which is an essential part of Service Mesh controlplane that governs all Envoy Proxies. Istio is configured using Kubernetes CRD which allows a user to interact with it using Kubernetes objects.Fig. 1. An architecture of Istio Service Mesh.As Envoy participates in communication between services, it adds some delay to it. Based on [4], Istio generally adds around 3-ms latency for a mesh with 1,000 requests per second across 16 connections. This result can be improved [5] using a Container Network Interface (CNI) plugin, which supports SOCKMAP from the Linux kernel, such as Calico [6] and Cilium [7].As the communication is always intercepted by at least one Envoy Proxy, the traffic can be easily traced and monitored. Every Envoy instance can be configured to collect metrics on the traffic that it is passing. These metrics are further collected and stored by Prometheus [8], which can be deployed as a part of Istio control plane. Users can use the data in multiple ways depending on their needs, e.g. for observability and diagnostics using Kiali [9], which visualizes the structure of mesh and presents flows between components.NetMARKS is intended to be fully backward compatible with kube-scheduler. The most effective way to achieve this is to utilize Kubernetes Scheduler Extension mechanism. Extenders, including NetMARKS, are implemented as separate HTTP services that are contacted by the scheduler whenever a new pod needs to be scheduled. It is assumed that Istio is enabled for all of cluster namespaces, and Prometheus service is deployed as a part of Istio control plane.NetMARKS uses data collected by the Prometheus to make the scheduling decision. It retrieves two metrics from there: istio_request_bytes_sum and istio_response_bytes_sum, which contain the number of bytes that is transferred in requests and responses respectively. The application entity does not exist in Kubernetes, so it is defined by Istio as a set of pods residing in the same namespace and having the same app label.Both requests and responses metrics are summed in (1) to calculate F_(t_1,t_2)^(A,B), which is an average data flow between applications A and B in time period [t_1,t_2 ] in bytes per second. 〖req〗_t^(A,B) is the number of bytes in requests from application A to application B until t in bytes, and 〖resp〗_t^(B,A)- same for responses from B to A, with respect to 〖req〗_t^(A,B).(1)Metrics are collected periodically while keeping the average flow, since the start of data collection using (2).(2)Let F(t_i) be the current flow at a given time t_i, after expanding F_(t_(i-1), t_i)^(A,B) in (2) with (1). Then, its final numerical model can be derived as follows.(3)This data flow metric is used to assess each feasible node that has not been filtered out. The algorithm has two input parameters: a Pod to be scheduled and a Node. Current state of pods assignment to nodes is required to determine where to bind the new Pod, so NetMARKS retrieves this information via Kubernetes API.Operation "Get all traffic neighbors of Pod" selects data flow metrics, where namespace and application label of the Pod match either source or destination of the traffic.The result of the algorithm can be understood as a sum of the traffic bandwidths between the Pod communication peers assigned to the Node. To calculate the Score, the algorithm iterates over all the pods that intersect between a set of pods assigned to the Node and a set of Pod communication partners. Then, it adds the flow data to the final result if namespaces are matched.Scheduling example: Consider 4 applications:- F: farm, producing grain- W: well, producing water- P: pig farm, producing pigs, requiring grain and water- S: slaughter, producing meat, requiring pigsFig. 2 shows relation and traffic flows between applications. Assuming that F, W, and S are already running on nodes, the algorithm calculates the score in order to place pod with P as follows:- Node1: State={F},Score=30+50=80- Node2: State={W},Score=40+70=110- Node3: State={S},Score=60+100=160- Node4: State={},Score=0The node3 receives the highest score, because placing pig farm together with slaughter allows to use intra-node communication, the expected volume of which is bigger than others.Has NetMARKS been validated from rigorous experiments? Yes!!We validated our solution using different workloads and processing layouts. Based on our analysis, NetMARKS can reduce application response time up to 37 percent and save up to 50 percent of inter-node bandwidth in a fully automated manner. This significant improvement is crucial to Kubernetes adoption in 5G use cases, especially for multi-access edge computing and machine-to-machine communication.Publications: https://infocom.info/day/3 ↓(Day3: Containers and Data Centers session “NetMARKS: Network Metrics-AwaRe Kubernetes Scheduler Powered by Service Mesh”)What is the role of Samsung Open Source Group?We have been contributing our idea into various open source projects in technical domains such as telecommunication, IoT, cloud, robotics, artificial intelligence, and so on with various developers across Samsung Electronics and others from various companies and R&D institutes, in order to make the better technical innovation and the bigger ecosystem in an open collaboration. If you are interested in our recent activities, please visit our official website https://opensource.samsung.com/.Reference[1] W. T. Marek Grabowski, “Kubernetes scheduling features or how can i make the system do what i want,” in KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe, 2017. ↓[Online]. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbPcb2JuJPw[2] A. Verma, L. Pedrosa, M. R. Korupolu, D. Oppenheimer, E. Tune, and J. Wilkes, “Large-scale cluster management at Google with Borg,” in Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys), Bordeaux, France, 2015.[3] “The envoy proxy.” [Online]. Available: https://www.envoyproxy.io/[4] “Istio performance best practices.” [Online]. ↓Available:https://istio.io/latest/blog/2019/performance-best-practices/[5] N. Kapocius, “Performance studies of kubernetes network solutions,” in 2020 IEEE Open Conference of Electrical, Electronic and Information Sciences (eStream), 2020, pp. 1–6.[6] “Project calico.” [Online]. Available: https://www.projectcalico.org/[7] “Project cilium.” [Online]. Available: https://cilium.io/[8] “The prometheus project.” [Online]. Available: https://prometheus.io/[9] “Kiali - service mesh management for istio.” [Online]. Available: https://kiali.io/* Original Contents : https://research.samsung.com/blog/Open-Source-Kubernetes-for-the-next-level-of-network-virtualization June 17, 2021
The ONAP Open Source Software community releases its 8th version, with significant contribution from Samsung The Open Networking Automation Platform (ONAP) is a comprehensive platform for real-time, policy-driven service orchestration and automation for networks and edge services. It is being developed as an open source software project with neutral governance under the auspices of The Linux Foundation. Started back in early 2017, it has recently made available its 8th release, codenamed ‘Honolulu’.This release brings cloud native and modular capabilities with deeper 5G and O-RAN integration for Communication Service Providers and Enterprise. The integration with O-RAN (another open initiative, aimed at bringing flexibility and more vendor choice to Radio Access networks) will enable RAN operators to optimize their radio network and reduce their cost of operation. Newly introduced 5G network slicing features in ONAP will open the door for new services to be offered by mobile network operators. The end-to-end 5G functionality in this release spans across the Radio, Transport and Core network domains which is crucial for providing the long anticipated 5G services of immersive AR/VR, Factory automation and connected vehicles.Over 200 developers from 25 organizations collaborated to produce Honolulu, the eighth release of the Linux Foundation ONAP project. Samsung played a significant role in contributions for this release, that amounted to it being one of the top-5 contributing companies:As a leader in wireless networks market, our engineers were able to use their expertise to improve ONAP and make it suitable for managing and orchestrating modern networks. Some of the main areas of contribution for Samsung in this release were Modularity, O-RAN integration, and Cloud Native Network Functions (CNFs).Modularity continues to be an important aspect of ONAP. It allows users to pick and choose the components they need for their specific use case and Honolulu continues to advance modularity. The ONAP Operation Manager (OOM) project is a key enabler of this modularity. It provides an easy method for users to indicate which of the many ONAP modules they would like to deploy in their environment. Samsung engineers contributed numerous improvements to this project during the Honolulu release. One of our engineers, Krzysztof Opasiak from Samsung Research R&D Institute-Poland (SRPOL), holds a ‘committer’ position in this project. During this release he demonstrated his expertise and dedication to ONAP quality by reviewing numerous incoming patches. His work was crucial for driving the Honolulu release to its successful completion.ONAP continues to be Service Management and Orchestration (SMO) of choice in O-RAN use cases. A key enhancement in the Honolulu release was broader support for the non-RT RIC functionality and the O-RAN A1 standard, both of which are implemented in the CCSDK and SDN-C projects. The O-RAN A1 interface provides a flexible way for RAN operators to manage wide area RAN network optimization reducing capex investment needs. Both the enhanced A1 interface controller and A1 policy capabilities are now usable in ONAP with a Near-Real-Time Radio Intelligent Controller (nRTRIC) thanks to the contributions of Samsung engineers. This functionality is also used downstream in O-RAN-Software Community (OSC) non-RT RIC project, strengthening alignment between ONAP & OSC.The Honolulu release has important updates to support Cloud Native Network Functions (CNF). The functionality includes configuration of Helm based CNFs and seamless day 1, 2 operations. The Configuration API allows a user to create, modify and delete Kubernetes. resource templates and their base parameters and the Profile API allows for sophisticated day 0 configuration. Samsung engineers leveraged their expertise in understanding the architecture of modern CNFs and contributed to the implementation of the interfaces between ONAP and Kubernetes.Peer code review is one of the pillars of successful open source software projects like ONAP. Samsung engineers contributing to ONAP are well versed in this methodology and practice it daily for both their internal and external software development work. During the Honolulu release our Samsung colleagues were among the leaders in code reviews, putting the company in the top-4 companies in terms of ONAP code reviews. Two Samsung engineers, Krzysztof Opasiak and Bartek Grzybowski were among the top-10 reviewers.One of the areas that is often overlooked in projects like ONAP is system integration and testing. While it rarely gets a mention during the announcement of a software release, the quality of the integration and testing infrastructure of a project could make the difference between break and make. We are proud to say that the dedication of Samsung engineers that worked on the ONAP Integration project made a significant impact and was an important factor in the success of this release. During the work on the Honolulu release, the ONAP community reflected on the work done during the previous release (‘Guilin’). Our efforts have been recognized by the community and a few of our colleagues won several awards.Pawel Wieczorek, Senior Software Engineer from the Open Source Group in Samsung R&D Institute-Poland has been awarded in the Automation Testing & Test Coverage category for supporting the Integration Project Technical Lead.Another award, the ‘ Scalability, Security, Stability and Performance (S3P) Improvements’ category has been granted to the whole Integration Team in which our company has a few active members:- Bartek Grzybowski, Senior DevOps Engineer from the Network Cloud Team in SRPOL- Lasse Kaihlavirta, Senior Software Architect from the Network Cloud Team in SRPOL- Pawel Wieczorek, Senior Software Engineer from the Open Source Group in SRPOLWe are honored and humbled to receive these awards from the community and are very proud of our colleagues achievements.Honolulu is the first release to follow the new release cadence that will allow for more frequent releases, up to three times a year. The process behind this release cadence is yet another area where Samsung team members led the way for the ONAP community. The next ONAP release planned for 2H of 2021 and will be named Istanbul. It will explore additional intent-based networking and AI/ML integrations.* Original Contents : https://research.samsung.com/blog/The-ONAP-Open-Source-Software-community-releases-its-8th-version-with-significant-contribution-from-Samsung June 17, 2021
Newest ROS2 Distribution "Galactic Geochelone" Released! May 2021 comes with many new and exciting changes: easing of COVID-19 restrictions in parts of the world, a warm and eventful Kentucky Derby, and the newest release of ROS2, Galactic Geochelone! Galactic is the 7th release of the new Robot Operating System (ROS) 2.0, built on DDS to be the production grade middleware for robotics with all of the amazing tools you came to love in ROS.ROS2 was redesigned from the ground up to handle non-ideal networks found in real-world production environments, communicate between multiple robots in a fleet securely, operate on low-power embedded systems, and leverage the real-time capacity of several different DDS vendors. Galactic is another step forward in its journey; extending existing capabilities and expanding new ones!Released on May 23rd, Galactic provides many improvements that have been in the works for the last year. The expected end of life of Galactic will be November 2022, at which time the next LTS distribution of ROS2 will have been released (codenamed “H-Turtle”). Most notably to Galactic, Cyclone DDS is now the default ROS MiddleWare (RMW) vendor. Eclipse Cyclone DDS [1] is a DDS implementation donated to the Eclipse Foundation by ADLINK, building off of their success with Vortex DDS. It has rapidly developed into a community favorite having a great out-of-the-box experience for users and true zero-copy IPC leveraging Eclipse’s Iceoryx project. Other DDS vendors that have Tier 1 support include eProsima’s Fast-DDS [2] and RTI’s Connext DDS [3]. Both of these DDS implementations are still available as binaries for easy install, unit testing support by Open Robotics, and only require setting a single environmental variable to utilize in your system.The ROS2 client library and its recursive dependencies have received a Quality Level 1 rating as set out in REP 2004[4], the highest level of quality possible. This translates to high unit and integration test coverage, strict policies regarding the quality of code introduced, process control, and stability. This quality level rating applies not only to rclcpp, but all of its dependencies (e..g rcl, rclc, rmw, etc), marking quality and stability up and down the entire middleware stack. Additionally, ROS2 pushes the default C++ version from C++14 to C++17.Two particularly great feature updates occurred in Galactic. It is now possible to externally configure Quality of Service (QoS) settings in ROS2 configuration files and rosbag2 has become substantially more reliable. Rather than statically defining QoS settings in your ROS2 code, you can now opt-in to allow for dynamically overriding these settings at run-time with your parameter file to try different profiles or reconfigure for unique use-cases [5]. rosbag2 was notably “buggy” in Foxy and older distributions. Even in high-stress networking environments, Galactic’s rosbag2 was able to successfully record 100% of messages (closer to 30% for Foxy). Many new features were also added including compression, playback control settings, commandline utilities, and regular expression support for topics to record and playback [6].These contributions, and many more, were brought to fruition due to the establishment of the ROS2 Technical Steering Committee (TSC) [7]. The TSC is a group of research and industry leaders who are contributing to the success of ROS2 and the related ecosystem, including Samsung, LG, Microsoft, Amazon, and many others. Samsung Electronics is a member of this TSC, leading the development of cutting-edge localization and mobile robotics technology.TSC Member Companies [8]The driving reason so many users choose ROS isn’t just the middleware, timing, logging, and launch systems-- it is the rich ecosystem of robotics capabilities built on ROS. The vast majority of your favorite projects have already been ported to ROS2, many of which have also received significant upgrades. Even now, major projects like Navigation2 (aka Nav2), MoveIt2, and ROS2 Control are receiving significant attention from industry and the community to create next-generation capabilities.Nav2 has had a substantial number of updates from Foxy to Galactic, including 3 new algorithms for planning and control, 7 new behavior tree nodes, and overhauls of external APIs [9]. New Hybrid-A*, A*, and Regulated Pure Pursuit controllers enable Ackermann and legged vehicles to have first-class support in Nav2. A new Theta* planner allows for planning to prioritize straight-line any-angle plans quickly through constrained spaces.The default behavior tree of Nav2 was redesigned to be more responsive to preemption calls and execute a minimum set of recovery behaviors to resolve an issue rather than iterate through all possible behaviors. New behavior tree nodes now make it possible to dynamically change planner, controller, or the new ‘goal checker’ plugins from an external application or in unique behavior tree contexts.Further, with the introduction of the new Costmap Filters API, we have support for Keepout Zones and Speed Restricted Zones out-of-the-box with tutorials for setup and use [10].The new Nav2 Waypoint Follower enables basic robot autonomy by following specific waypoints, stopping at each, and executing the new ‘Task Executor’ plugins to do anything from pausing, to taking a photo, to picking up a box with an attached robot arm. Complementary, a new action API was added enabling Navigate Through Poses behavior. Rather than point-to-point navigation or waypoint following, the Navigate Through Poses action will allow you to specify an arbitrary number of intermediate hard-pose constraints for your robot to navigate through and execute the path without stopping at each via-point. When combined with the Smac Hybrid-A* planner, this creates a kinematically feasible and smooth path between any number of intermediate points.A full list of new features in Nav2 can be found in [9].Looking into the future, Spring 2022 we can expect the release of the next LTS release of ROS2, HTurtle. By then, a whole new host of exciting features, capabilities, and algorithms will be available to build amazing robot systems using ROS2.Reference[1] https://github.com/eclipse-cyclonedds/cyclonedds[2] https://github.com/eProsima/Fast-DDS[3] https://www.rti.com/products[4] https://ros.org/reps/rep-2004.html#quality-level-1[5] http://design.ros2.org/articles/qos_configurability.html[6] https://github.com/ros2/rosbag2[7] https://docs.ros.org/en/foxy/Governance.html[8] All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.[9] https://navigation.ros.org/migration/Foxy.html[10] https://navigation.ros.org/tutorials/index.html* Original Contents : https://research.samsung.com/blog/Newest-ROS2-Distribution-Galactic-Geochelone-Released June 17, 2021