ROS1 or 2 for a newbie?

ROS ROS General
1

As I am still in my infancy stage learning ROS, with the full expectation of migrating to ROS2, should I just focus on ROS2 training instead? It makes sense to me, but wanted to collect other thoughts on this.

Thanks,
D

2

You won’t be able to achieve as much with ROS2 as with ROS1 without a lot of additional expertise. This is not because ROS2 is harder (it isn’t) but because there are fewer libraries and packages available for ROS2 at this stage.

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3

Roger that. Does the ros1-bridge not handle that? Is that more specific to communications?

Thanks again,
D

4

It does, so it’s not like all that functionality is inaccessible from ROS2. But you would need to learn a reasonable amount about packages in ROS1 as well to know how to use them properly. Thus exclusively focusing on ROS2 would leave you without significant functionality.

Personally, if I were starting now, I would start with ROS1 and learn about what ROS2 can do without learning how to do it until I encountered something that could be done in ROS2 but not ROS1 (real time control, for example). Then I would learn the ROS2 stuff necessary for that. Viewing ROS1 and ROS2 as an exclusive-or relationship is not a good approach.

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5

@defied what do you want ROS to do for you?

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Vision, geo-location and actuation for now.

D