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ros2_uwp

Instructions, tools and examples for incorporating ROS2 in Windows UWP Application Containers

Motivation

The Universal Windows Platform (UWP) is the preferred technology for creating modern applications for all versions of Windows 10. They're also the only way to create and deploy applications for certain Windows devices such as IoT Core or HoloLens on which robotic applications are particularly interesting.

ROS2 is the newest version of ROS developed as a cross-platform standard desktop framework. With some work, ROS2 can be made to work within the context of a UWP application. This repository provides instructions, tools and examples to aid the process of building a version of ROS2 that's compatible with the WinRT/UWP API.

What's different about ROS2 in UWP?

ROS2 is ordinarily built as a standard Desktop application targeting the full Win32 API. UWP applications run in a sandboxed context (for security) and are allowed use of the WinRT APIs as well as a subset of the Win32 API.

WinRT APIs are built to project into several runtime langauges (C++/CX, C#, Javascript) through interface definitions. ros2_uwp aims to take advantage of the C++/WinRT language projection, a native projection (using standard C++17) to consume the ROS2 rclcpp C++ client library.

However, there are several restrictions to UWP applications to consider. The most relevant considerations for ROS2 are (this list is not exhaustive):

  • No filesystem access, or at least not like standard Win32 apps. Impacts:
    • SROS (stores security credentials on the filesystem)
    • ament_index: A runtime queryable index of packages (plugin packages, component libraries, etc)
  • No environment variables. Impacts:
    • Dynamically selecting DDS implementation
    • Various other ROS2 settings
  • Restrictions on dynamic library loads. Impacts:
    • Dynamic loads must be known a-priori and built/packaged with the UWP application
    • Client libraries doing explict loads (rclcpp components, rmw_typesupport runtime selection) must be modified to use LoadPackagedLibrary instead of LoadLibrary
  • Restricted API set. Impacts:
    • Win32 APIs not available to UWP applications must be avoided. Impacts:
    • All target source should be compiled targeting UWP to flag restricted APIs
    • This can be especially challenging in third party code like DDS implementations

... And many more considerations.

Compiling for UWP can be considered a form of cross compilation (and in fact UWP can be targeted from cmake using the CMAKE_SYSTEM_NAME flag, commonly used for targeting cross compilation toolchains). As with any cross compilation there is typically one subset of code which is built for and run on the host architecture, and another subset of code which is built for and run on the target architecture.

ROS2 on UWP follows this paradaigm, even if the machine architecture of the host and target are the same. The ament packages (the ROS2 build system) will be compiled for and run on the host machine in a standard Win32 context. The core ROS2 packages themselves will be built for the target architecture targeting the UWP/WinRT runtime.

What's Included?

This repo contains two ROS2 repos files:

  • build_tools.repos - Projects used for building ROS itself, to be built and run in a regular Win32 console context
  • ros2_uwp.repos - Minimal set of ROS2 repositories to enable base functionality up through the rclcpp layer (including a DDS implementation) which have been proven to build and function within a UWP application container

Build Instructions

Setup

First, install Visual Studio 2017 (Community is fine) and enable the 'Desktop development with C++ workflow'. NOTE: Visual Studio 2019 ought to work fine but is untested for these instructions.

Visit the official Installing ROS2 on Windows instructions and follow the steps, skipping the installation of any third party binaries (OpenSSL, asio, cuint, eigen, tinyxml, log4cxx) These binaries have not been compiled for UWP. Instead, these instructions will build all necessary third party dependencies from source.

NOTE: If you have previously installed binary packages for the various third party libraries (OpenSSL, asio, cuint, eigen, tinyxml, log4cxx) they should be uninstalled prior to attempting a UWP build to avoid accidentally pulling non-UWP binaries into the build. You might also have success simply removing the entries from the cmake cache in the registry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Kitware\CMake\Packages -- prepending each entry with an underscore will prevent find_package() from picking up the libraries.

Create A Workspace

Due to filepath restrictions on Windows, it's recommended to choose a short root path:

mkdir c:\ros2_uwp
mkdir c:\ros2_uwp\tools
mkdir c:\ros2_uwp\target

Build The Tools

Open up a Visual Studio 2017 developer prompt as administrator. You can do this from the start menu, or by running the following from an administrator command prompt:

"c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Community\Common7\Tools\vsdevcmd"

Next, clone the build_tools source packages

cd c:\ros2_uwp\tools
mkdir src
curl -sk https://raw.githubusercontent.com/theseankelly/ros2_uwp/master/build_tools.repos > build_tools.repos
vcs import src < build_tools.repos

Build the tools for the host system using colcon:

colcon build --merge-install --cmake-args -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF

Finally, source the tools install environment to add them to your path:

call c:\ros2_uwp\tools\install\local_setup.bat

Build ROS2 for UWP

From the same command prompt (admin VS dev prompt with the ROS2 tools setup script sourced), clone the ros2_uwp source packages

cd c:\ros2_uwp\target
mkdir src
curl -sk https://raw.githubusercontent.com/theseankelly/ros2_uwp/master/ros2_uwp.repos > ros2_uwp.repos
vcs import src < ros2_uwp.repos

And build ROS2 for UWP, replacing %ROS2_ARCH% with Win32, x64, or ARM

colcon build --merge-install --packages-ignore rmw_fastrtps_dynamic_cpp rcl_logging_log4cxx rcl_logging_spdlog rclcpp_components ros2trace tracetools_launch tracetools_read tracetools_test tracetools_trace --cmake-args -A %ROS2_ARCH% -DCMAKE_SYSTEM_NAME=WindowsStore -DCMAKE_SYSTEM_VERSION=10.0 -DTHIRDPARTY=ON -DINSTALL_EXAMPLES=OFF -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF -DRCL_LOGGING_IMPLEMENTATION=rcl_logging_noop

Using ROS2 in a UWP Application

High-level steps:

  1. Create a c++/WinRT project in Visual Studio
  2. Add c:\ros2_uwp\target\install\include to the project include path
  3. Add c:\ros2_uwp\target\install\Lib to the project Lib path
  4. Add necessary libraries to the project linker directives

You must include all depedent DLLs in the project itself for packaging. This is done by right-clicking on the project and choosing 'Add existing item. Select all DLLs under c:\ros2_uwp\target\install\bin. Once added, select them all, right click, and choose 'properties'. Mark them as content to be copied and packaged along with the application.

Finally, enable the following app capabilities in the manifest:

  • Internet (Client & Server)
  • Private Networks

For one example, refer to the hololens-ros2 project.

More standalone examples coming soon.

Credits and Related Work

Special thanks to Esteve Fernandez who's work on the ros2_dotnet project served as a starting point for the curated repos list in this repository.

Here are some links to related work:

  • ros2_dotnet: C# language bindings on top of the rcl layer.
  • C/C++ minimal variant : Ongoing discussions on discourse and on REP-2001 to create a curated minimal C++ ROS2 variant. This is a similar approach but is designed more for cross compilation to embedded targets. Uses many features not yet available within UWP containers (class_loader, plugins, etc)