Beta 2 (codename ‘r2b2’; July 2017)

Supported Platforms

We support ROS 2 Beta 2 on three platforms: Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial), macOS 10.12 (Sierra), and Windows 10. We provide both binary packages and instructions for how to compile from source for all 3 platforms (see install instructions as well as documentation).

Features

Improvements since Beta 1 release

• DDS_Security support (aka SROS2, see sros2)

• Debian packages for Ubuntu Xenial

• Typesupport has been redesigned so that you only build a single executable and can choose one of the available RMW implementations by setting an environment variable (see documentation).

• Namespace support for nodes and topics (see design article, see known issues below).

• A set of command-line tools using the extensible ros2 command (see conceptual article).

• A set of macros for logging messages in C / C++ (see API docs of rcutils).

New demo application

• Turtlebot 2 demos using the following repositories that have been (partially) converted to ROS 2 (Linux only):

  • ros_astra_camera

  • depthimage_to_laserscan

  • pcl_conversions

  • cartographer

  • cartographer_ros

  • ceres-solver

  • navigation

  • teleop_twist_keyboard

  • joystick_drivers

  • teleop_twist_joy

• Dummy_robot demo:

  • robot_model

  • robot_state_publisher

Selected features from previous Alpha/Beta releases

For the complete list, see earlier release notes.

• C++ and Python implementations of ROS 2 client libraries including APIs for:

  • Publishing and subscribing to ROS topics

  • Requesting and replying ROS services (synchronous (C++ only) and asynchronous)

  • Getting and setting ROS parameters (C++ only, synchronous and asynchronous)

  • Timer callbacks

• Support for interoperability between multiple DDS/RTPS implementations

  • eProsima Fast RTPS is our default implementation, and is included in the binary packages

  • RTI Connext is supported: build from source to try it out

  • We initially supported PrismTech OpenSplice but support for it is currently on hold

• A graph API for network events

• Distributed discovery

• Realtime safe code paths for publish and subscribe with compatible DDS implementation (only Connext at the moment)

  • Support for custom allocators

• ROS 1 <-> ROS 2 dynamic bridge node

• Executor threading model (C++ only)

• Component model to compose nodes at compile / link / runtime

• Managed component using a standard lifecycle

• Extended .msg format with new features:

  • Bounded arrays

  • Default values

Known issues

• We’re tracking issues in various repositories, but the main entry point is the ros2/ros2 issue tracker

• We’d like to highlight a known issue that we are looking into which doesn’t allow two topics with the same base name but different namespaces to have a different type when using rmw_connext_cpp.

• Services with long responses are not working with Fast-RTPS. The fix, while not being part of beta2, is available upstream so you can work around this issue by building from source using Fast-RTPS master branch.