Announcing ROS 2 Easy Mode

Next Generation ROS
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Hi everyone,

When using ROS 2 in its default configuration, you may encounter challenges in the following scenarios:

  • Lossy Wi-Fi networks
  • Network congestion
  • Large data transmission (e.g., video streams, LIDAR data)
  • Discovery issues in large-scale deployments or environments without multicast support

We’re excited to announce ROS 2 Easy Mode, a new feature designed to optimize ROS 2 and Fast DDS for these situations with just a single configuration setting. This enhancement significantly improves performance and simplifies the out-of-the-box experience for users.

Want to try it right away? Download our ROS 2 distribution, Vulcanexus, and explore the benefits of Easy Mode today. This feature will also be included in the official ROS 2 distribution soon.

Documentation and Resources:

Have questions? Feel free to reach out!

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Thanks for making this available @Jaime_Martin_Losa et al.

To enable this feature the user only needs to set the environment variable ROS2_EASY_MODE=<ip>.

Hm. ROS_MASTER_URI was already taken I understand? :slight_smile:

Edit:

could you say something about which distributions this will be supported in? Only Rolling, or will it be backported?

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It is not exactly the same, as we create a discovery server per machine, but yes.

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Hi @gavanderhoorn

This feature is already available in Vulcanexus Jazzy and will be available in ROS 2 Rolling and the upcoming ROS 2 Kilted.

It cannot be backported as this is something coming in Fast DDS v3, which breaks API compatibility with Fast DDS v2.14 (ROS 2 Jazzy).

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Hi, I browse the doc quickly (and maybe lost some thing), as @gavanderhoorn said, I would also like to know, create a discovery server per machine

What will happen if that machine <host_a_ip> just down after some running?

If we have more questions, where do you suggest to disscuss?

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Hi @MiaoDX

Nothing, at that point, you have a network of redundant discovery servers.