I’ve had second thoughts about if we really need a shim. In the end, what I want is to mix ROS1 and ROS2 packages in the same system. If the ros1_bridge works well enough, maybe that’s all I need (I haven’t tried it yet).
My reasoning goes like this: What’s great about ROS1 is the wealth of community-contributed packages. In recent years, I was forced to use a different robotics framework on some projects. The workflow was usually like this:
- week 1: figure out what components we need for this project, discover that 90% already exist as ROS packages
- month 1-4: port all those ROS packages over to Different Robotics Framework
- month 5-6: actually implement the missing 10% from scratch
I often banged my head screaming “It would be so easy if we just used ROS”, and I would very much like to avoid repeating this experience, where Different Robotics Framework == ROS2. In the foreseeable future, this problem isn’t going to go away, because there are tons of ROS1 packages out there that are still useful, but no longer actively developed, so there is little chance of them being converted to ROS2 any time soon. If the ros1_bridge works perfectly, that would allow us to use the wealth of packages from ROS1, while porting everything over to ROS2 piecemeal. I’ll have to invest some time trying the ros1_bridge soon.