ROS2 in large architectures

Quality Assurance
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3

Our company is in a very similar boat - looking to slowly migrate parts of our in-house framework (beginning with comms) to use ROS 2.

It is important for us to maintain our current approach as we have large projects mid-development, while allowing for “experimentation” with ROS. We have found the following:

  • Packages that are pure CMake work fine
  • Packages that are fully ROS (built with ament) work fine
  • Packages that we want to be able to build both without ROS and with ROS (e.g. to include constructors/casts to ROS types, which are macro’d out for non-ROS builds) are a real mess since we need to toggle between using ament functions and the regular CMake functions (e.g. target_link_libraries and similar).

We ended up writing a CMake macro to handle it all as well as a few other things that we were doing for every package which cleaned it up a bit.

Interested to see how others have tackled similar issues.

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