Beta2-Overview.rst

Beta 2 (codename r2b2; July 2017)

Welcome to the latest release of ROS 2 software! We hope that you try it out and provide feedback.

Supported Platforms

We support ROS 2 Beta 2 on three platforms: Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial), Mac OS X 10.12 (Sierra), and Windows 10. We provide both binary packages and instructions for how to compile from source for all 3 platforms (see install instructions <Installation> as well as documentation).

Features

Improvements since the Beta 1 release:

• DDS_Security support (aka SROS2, see sros2)
• Debian packages for Ubuntu Xenial (see Debian install instructions <Linux-Install-Debians>).
• Typesupport has been redesigned so that you only build a single executable and can choose one of the available RMW implementations by setting an environment variable (see documentation <Working-with-multiple-RMW-implementations>).
• Namespace support for nodes and topics (see design article, see known issues below).
• A set of command-line tools using the extensible ros2 command (see tutorial <Introspection-with-command-line-tools>).
• A set of macros for logging messages in C / C++ (see API docs of rcutils).

New demo application:

• Turtlebot 2 demos using the following repositories that have been (partially) converted to ROS 2 (Linux only):
  • ros_astra_camera
  • depthimage_to_laserscan
  • pcl_conversions
  • cartographer
  • cartographer_ros
  • ceres-solver
  • navigation
  • teleop_twist_keyboard
  • joystick_drivers
  • teleop_twist_joy
• Dummy_robot demo <dummy-robot-demo>:
  • robot_model
  • robot_state_publisher

Selected features from previous Alpha/Beta releases (for the complete list, see the earlier release notes <Releases>):

• C++ and Python implementations of ROS 2 client libraries including APIs for:
  • Publishing and subscribing to ROS topics
  • Requesting and replying ROS services (synchronous (C++ only) and asynchronous)
  • Getting and setting ROS parameters (C++ only, synchronous and asynchronous)
  • Timer callbacks
• Support for interoperability between multiple DDS/RTPS implementations
  • eProsima FastRTPS is our default implementation, and is included in the binary packages
  • RTI Connext is supported: build from source to try it out
  • We initially supported PrismTech OpenSplice but support for it is currently on hold
• A graph API for network events
• Distributed discovery
• Realtime safe code paths for publish and subscribe with compatible DDS implementation (only Connext at the moment)
  • Support for custom allocators
• ROS 1 <-> ROS 2 dynamic bridge node
• Executor threading model (C++ only)
• Component model to compose nodes at compile / link / runtime
• Managed component using a standard lifecycle
• Extended .msg format with new features:
  • Bounded arrays
  • Default values

Known issues:

• We’re tracking issues in various repositories, but the main entry point is the ros2/ros2 issue tracker
• We’d like to highlight a known issue that we are looking into which doesn't allow two topics with the same base name but different namespaces to have a different type when using rmw_connext_cpp.
• Services with long responses are not working with Fast-RTPS. The fix, while not being part of beta2, is available upstream so you can work around this issue by building from source using Fast-RTPS master branch.