ROS 2 Ardent Apalone (codename ‘ardent’; December 2017)

Welcome to the first non-beta release of ROS 2 software named Ardent Apalone!

Supported Platforms

This version of ROS 2 is supported on three platforms:

  • Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial)

  • Mac macOS 10.12 (Sierra)

  • Windows 10

Binary packages as well as instructions for how to compile from source are provided for all 3 platforms (see install instructions as well as documentation).

Features

New features in this ROS 2 release

  • Distributed discovery, publish / subscribe, request / response communication

    • Provided by a C API

    • Implemented using different vendors:

      • eProsima’s Fast RTPS as well as ADLINK’s OpenSplice (from binary and source)

      • RTI’s Connext (only from source)

    • Numerous quality of service settings for handling non-ideal networks

    • DDS Security support (with Connext and Fast RTPS)

  • C++ and Python 3 client libraries

    • Sharing common code in C to unify the implementation

    • Execution model separated from the nodes, composable nodes

    • Node-specific parameters (only in C++ atm)

    • Life cycle (only in C++ atm)

    • Optionally intra-process communication using the same API (only in C++)

  • Message definitions (with bounded arrays and strings as well as default values)

  • Command line tools (e.g. ros2 run)

  • rviz with a few display types (the Windows version will likely follow in a few weeks)

  • File system-based resource index (querying information without recursive crawling)

  • Realtime safe code paths for pub / sub (with compatible DDS implementations only)

  • Bridge between ROS 1 and ROS 2

  • HSR demo see Beta 3

  • Turtlebot demo see Beta 2

For a more detailed description please see the Features page.

Changes since Beta 3 release

Improvements since the Beta 3 release:

  • rviz

  • Different initialization options for message data structures in C++ (see design doc)

  • Logging API improvements, now also used in the demos

  • Time support in C++ with different clocks

  • wait-for-service support in the Python client library

  • Draft implementation of REP 149 specifying format 3 of the package manifest files

Known Issues

  • Fast RTPS performance with larger data like the image demo

  • Using Connext it is currently not allowed for two topics with the same base name but different namespaces to have a different type (see issue).

  • Listing of node names (e.g. using ros2 node list) does not work across some rmw implementations.

  • On Windows Python launch files might hang when trying to abort using Ctrl-C (see issue). In order to continue using the shell which is blocked by the hanging command you might want to end the hanging Python process using the process monitor.