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ROS 2 Iron Irwini Release

by kscottz on 5/23/23, 3:41 PM with 73 comments

• by amacneil on 5/23/23, 6:35 PM

  Congrats to the Open Robotics team and everyone who contributed to this release!

  Calling out a couple changes I'm excited about that we (Foxglove) helped contribute to:

  - MCAP is now the default logging format in Rosbag2[0]. This is a much more performant and configurable format than the previous default (SQLite-based). SQLite is still a fully supported alternative.

  - Message type definitions (schemas) can now be exchanged at runtime[1]. This means that tools such as rosbag2, or visualization tools such as Foxglove Studio[2] can now communicate with a ROS system over the network without needing a copy of the source code or complete ROS workspace.

  [0] https://github.com/ros2/rosbag2/pull/1160

  [1] https://github.com/ros2/ros2/issues/1159

  [2] https://github.com/foxglove/studio

• by cheeselip420 on 5/23/23, 5:10 PM

  Robotics is really really really really hard. So let's turn the entire thing into a system of distributed microservices, using CORBA/DDS for pubsub...

  It'd be like if you designed a video game so that the physics engine (motion planning) happened in one process, while rendering (perception) happened in another process and the world state needed to be exchanged via pubsub. Why do we keep doing this to ourselves?

• by ragebol on 5/23/23, 6:13 PM

  ROS (1/2) is just damn handy. There's a plethora of libraries available: navigation, localization, perception, motion planning, visualisation, record and replay events for debugging, high-level behavior definition with state machines and behavior trees, motion control, sensors, orchestration anything you need in a robotics system.

  I've seen various half-assed versions or something akin to ROS (IPC to have process isolation and distributed, with some processes running on a RTOS) seen built over the years. All of which sucked in different ways. Especially a tool like RViz is always missing. And in many many robotics video I see (of a moderately complex robot), there's ROS's RViz on some screen.

• by captaindiego on 5/23/23, 9:44 PM

  I like ROS, the library of things you can use to get prototypes running quick is nice, but wish they hadn't rolled its own build system in addition CMake (Catkin) with the concept of packages, while not being a true package manager. Whenever your middleware dictates your build system things start to get pretty messy. My dream for ROS 2 (or maybe 3) is one where ROS does less instead of more - sometimes simpler is better.

• by RobotToaster on 5/23/23, 8:21 PM

  How is package compatibility with the new version? When I looked at ROS before it seemed to have issues with certain packages only being available for older versions.

• by inamberclad on 5/23/23, 8:48 PM

  ROS is a good research platform, but when it comes down to brass tacks, people stick with smaller, simpler systems. I've used NASA CoreFlight professionally and while it doesn't have all the nice creature comforts, I'm much happier in a small, clean, C-only codebase that runs on Linux, VxWorks, and RTEMS, with two layers of abstraction at most.

• by EddieEngineers on 5/23/23, 7:37 PM

  How can I get into robotics? I absolutely love the field from the outside but have zero idea how to get into it. Currently a software engineer & studying mechanical engineering part time with a goal of going into robotics eventually, but it doesn’t seem to have a natural starting point for hobbyists.