ROS-I Training Day introduced ROS2 as advanced topic

/ Southwest Research Institute/

SwRI hosted a session for ROS-Industrial training onsite in San Antonio on October 8-10. Of special interest was an introduction to ROS2 as a new advanced topic. This was the first inclusion of ROS2 material at a ROS-Industrial Americas training event and drew significant interest, with over a dozen developers attending.

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ROS2 is a new iteration of ROS with many aspects undergoing complete redesigns, including core components such as the middleware layer and the build system. Along with these architectural redesigns, Open Robotics is taking the opportunity of breaking compatibility to make extensive improvements to the ROS experience in all aspects. As a consequence, many concepts, tools, and techniques we grew familiar with in ROS1 are no longer present and some upfront time learning about the changes is needed. The new training material developed at SwRI aims to ease this transition by providing some practice working in ROS2 for developers already familiar with ROS1 systems. There are currently three exercises developed which have been made available on the public ROS-Industrial training website. These exercises run through (1) the basics of working with ROS2 systems with a focus on the changes to the command-line tools, (2) the steps needed to port existing ROS1 packages with C++ code to functionally equivalent ROS2 packages, and (3) how to use the ROS1-ROS2 bridge to enable communication between two systems when porting is not yet feasible. Some additional details were also presented to the group, especially focused around SwRI’s ongoing experiences in porting a very large ROS1 codebase to ROS2.

Overall reception at the training event was quite positive, with a lot of interest to closely monitor the ongoing ROS2 development and see when the best time to start focusing on ROS2 will be. We expect that ROS2 training will continue to be a core topic, and plan to continue developing more material that will cover additional pieces of ROS2. Of course, eventually we expect to be training everyone in ROS2 from the start and have ROS1 relegated to maintenance mode. Be sure to check back frequently, as we’re right in the middle of this transition and updates could happen any time!