Here is a list of mini-projects that would be very helpful to the group. They are a great way to learn and get involved. Please reach out to Rob Woolley if you have any questions or are looking for ideas on how to get started.

Infrastructure

• Terraform/OpenTofu scripts to set up secure runners with a Bastion host, storage, security groups, etc. *Do rough calculations on costs involved with providing binary artifacts (eg. what files should be provided, which boards, cost per download, login required?, retention, CDN?) See NixOS as an example of the problem to avoid: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/the-nixos-foundations-call-to-action-s3-costs-require-community-support/28672

Maintenance

• Look in the common layers for recipes that need upreving (eg. meta-ros/meta-/recipes-//.bb)
• Create a ros-image-world build report that tracks which recipes succeed, fail, or are missing
• Add support for automated testing (eg. through ptest / ament_cmake_test / etc)
• Document support for MIL / SIL / PIL / HIL

Tooling

• Figure out how to add the SPDX attribute to the packages.xml file (according to schema) and have it detected by superflore
• Build a desktop for OE (Xfce? LxQt?) and get the GUI tools (Rviz, Gazebo, etc running)

Community Advocacy / Conferences

• Build a robot demo for the OpenEmbedded booth
• Create a 1-day beginning workshop for the OSS Summit on using ROS and OE
• Go through the ROS Tutorials with the SDK

R&D

• Investigate VSCode extensions useful to ROS
• Investigate using ROS devcontainers and/or Rocker for development
• Investigate how to containerize ROS nodes and create container images using OE
  • Try running OE containers on other hosts (eg Ubuntu and Debian)
• Figure out why ros-default-runtime and rosidl-adapter packages need to be explicitly added
• Attempt to build ROS Noetic and ROS 2 (Humble?) side-by-side in one image
• Add support for Space ROS demos
  • https://github.com/space-ros/docker
  • https://github.com/space-ros/demos
• Add packagegroups for better build coverage during sync updates
• Create an automatic webhook to run superflore when a new ROS sync is released
• Enhance kas configuration files to make it easier to get started as well as manage the matrix of combinations for advanced users
• A demo was suggested showing an example of a "fail-safe" demonstration (eg. medical robotics)
• Investigate Micro-ROS / Nano-ROS on MCUs and building with meta-ros
• Add support for Autoware
  • https://autowarefoundation.github.io/open-ad-kit-docs/main/version-1.0/start-guide/installation/getting-started/
  • https://github.com/orgs/autowarefoundation/discussions/2528
• Investigate pushing errorreports to Yocto Project (https://errors.yoctoproject.org/Errors/Latest/Autobuilder/)
• Investigate integration with CARLA Simulator
  • https://carla.readthedocs.io/projects/ros-bridge/en/latest/
  • https://github.com/carla-simulator/ros-bridge
• Use mash to generate "development" recipes for navigation on rolling
• Investigate support for hardware acceleration (https://github.com/ros-acceleration)
• Investigate support for PX4 with ROS2 bridge
• Add packagegroup for on-target development (See investigation here Making pika-spark build for qemuarm64)
• Investigate out-of-box support for accelerator runtimes (like CUDA, Vitis, and AMD Ryzers)
• Assess status of using OE + ROS for RPi Zero 2W: https://ardupilot.org/dev/docs/ros2-pi.html

Completed

• Research the work done by Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) to integrate with meta-ros
  • Completed by Saalim Quadri - Google Summer of Code 2025 project (https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/programs/2025/projects/OwFx8eRG)
• Investigate work being done by SpaceROS and how to create a SpaceROS image with meta-ros
  • Completed by Rob Woolley
    • https://github.com/robwoolley/meta-ros/tree/spaceros-preview
    • https://github.com/ros/meta-ros/issues/1398