ROS2 for Rust

Build status

Target	Status
Ubuntu 18.04

Introduction

This is a set of projects (bindings, code generator, examples and more) that enables developers to write ROS2 applications in Rust.

Features

The current set of features include:

• Generation of all builtin ROS types
• Support for publishers and subscriptions
• Tunable QoS settings

What's missing?

Lots of things!

• An ament build type for Cargo. The current examples use CMake to install and build the binaries... and it's really ugly.
• Component nodes
• Clients and services
• Tests
• Documentation

Limitations

• messages are deep-copied and this can be terribly inefficient for big messages like images; the current solution leverages C typesupport implementations and might benefits from a direct serialization/deserialization
• the current solution for crates export with CMake is not very robust
• rclrs interface is very limited for now and might not be so much idiomatic yet, any help and suggestion on the interface would be greatly appreciated
• due to the current ROS2 support of non-default clients, packages containing definitions of messages used in Rust crates must be present in the current workspace; otherwise message crates generation won't be triggered

Sounds great, how can I try this out?

You can build and run the example using the included Dockerfile:

git clone https://github.com/ros2-rust/ros2_rust.git
docker build --tag ros2:rust .
docker run -it --rm ros2:rust
ros2 run rclrs_examples rclrs_publisher &
ros2 run rclrs_examples rclrs_subscriber

Or do so manually as summarized in the steps below:

The following steps were last tested on Ubuntu 20.04.

# first, install vcstool from PyPI or apt:
# sudo apt install ros-foxy-desktop python3-vcstool libclang-dev clang
# pip install vcstool

mkdir -p ~/ros2_rust_ws/src/ros2-rust
cd ~/ros2_rust_ws/src/ros2-rust
git clone https://github.com/ros2-rust/ros2_rust.git
cd ../../
vcs import src < src/ros2-rust/ros2_rust/ros2_rust.repos
source /opt/ros/foxy/setup.sh
colcon build

Now you can just run a bunch of examples.

Publisher and subscriber

Publisher:

. ./install/setup.sh

ros2 run rclrs_examples rclrs_publisher

Subscriber:

. ./install/setup.sh

ros2 run rclrs_examples rclrs_subscriber

Enjoy!