Robot Operating System 2: Design, architecture, and uses in the wild

General
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Hi all,

Its your friendly neighborhood navigator and @tfoote @gerkey @clalancette @wjwwood here! We wanted to announce something really special to the ROS community today.

Today, Science Robotics published our article Robot Operating System 2: Design, architecture, and uses in the wild. It describes the motivations, requirements, design, and architecture of ROS 2 for the first time and is the official citation for ROS 2.

This is a piece of seminal work of Open Robotics (going back to when they were the Open Source Robotics Foundation spinning out of Willow Garage) to describe ROS 2 for current and future users that weren’t involved in the early days to have seen proto-ROS 2 as it was being constructed. It’s also a fantastic overview and common reference for the concepts behind ROS 2 and its design and architecture.

We also included analysis of performance in different configurations and networking environments as well as 5 really fantastic case studies of Ghost Robotics, Mission Robotics, Auterion Air, NASA VIPER Lunar Rover, and Otto Motors. We show how ROS 2 has not only helped them succeed, but how it accelerated them to the market, useful deployment, structured collaborations, and saved resources. To boot, it also shows ROS 2 in action on Land, Sea, Air, and even Space in some of the most modern and interesting areas (so what’s your excuse now, naysayers?).

Something I absolutely love is that Science Robotics decided to make this article unrestricted, so everyone everywhere can access the article, get it in PDF format, and print it out to read or share without a paywall. To me, that says everything about the importance of this work for the next 10+ years of robotics.

Our citation and another link to the document:

S. Macenski, T. Foote, B. Gerkey, C. Lalancette, W. Woodall, “Robot Operating System 2: Design, architecture, and uses in the wild,” Science Robotics vol. 7, May 2022.

I’d like to close by mentioning that this is really the seminal work of a decade of effort by folks globally, but especially the folks with the vision and execution at Open Robotics that have worked hard to maintain and even grow this community. But I’d like to thank everyone at Open Robotics, Technical Steering Committee members, and the army of contributors that powers this community. Without all of you, the robotics industry would still be bickering over the basics and unable to create the vast array of research and products we see today.

Happy ROSing,

Steve Macenski

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Honestly speaking, I am very excited about Robot Operating system 2. By reading this thread, I have learned about what major changes you want to bring to design and architecture. Overall, it is just so exciting and amazing.

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Congratulations to all involved, I have been using (and abusing :sweat_smile:) ROS since c-turtle.

This is a truly remarkable project backed by an even “remarkabler” comunity.

Best regards,
Martin

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Excellent article. Well done to all involved!

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Very excited about this paper, but it now appears to be behind a paywall.

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If you click on any of the links here, it will redirect you to the article without a paywall. The traffic has to come from this website, so if you’re OK with 1 extra click :wink:

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Oof, that seems very limiting. Consider adding the blog link in the banner, because you can’t get from the banner to this post, and then to this comment, to see a valid link.

That also doesn’t seem like a long-term solution, as I doubt people will be finding out about this publication through the Open Robotics blog. I’ve already seen people passing around the science.org link in the wild.

Have you considered putting this on arXiv, and uploading to Google Scholar (once it shows up, if this falls into the mandate), Research Gate, etc.? People are most likely going to find it through those places.

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The journal has restrictions in place. In some time we’ll be able to post additional copies to preprint servers but we have to abide by the rules the authors agreed to with the journal.

In the meantime, the blog post has links that bypass it. Might not be ideal, but its what we have for the moment. A few months down the line I can post more open access versions. Though, it was open access for the first 10,000 downloads it appears!

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Wow!,Excellent article

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