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Fast Zero-Copy Messaging with ROS 2 Intra-Process Communication

ROS 2 uses so-called “middleware” to perform communication between nodes. Over the years different middleware vendors have vied to become the Chosen Implementation, importantly by focusing on message passing efficiency. However: You can be even more efficient by just skipping the middleware completely and achieve true zero-copy messaging! And all you have to do is apply a simple convention: All publishers SHOULD allocate messages using unique pointers. All publishers SHOULD publish the messages using std::move. All subscribers SHOULD expect either a ConstSharedPtr or a const reference. Enable use_intra_process_comms Read on to understand why. ...

ROS 2 with Nix

Recently I started getting into the world of Nix. First, to manage my user environment using Home Manager, and now to manage my ROS 2 development environment. On any Linux distribution. TL;DR Want to have a full ROS 2 development environment, completely from scratch on any Linux distribution? Just run these two commands: sh <(curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -L https://nixos.org/nix/install) --daemon nix develop 'github:lopsided98/nix-ros-overlay/master#example-ros2-desktop-jazzy' Boom, you’re in a ROS 2 Jazzy development shell, where you can just immediately run something like: ...

Raspberry Pi + ROS 2 + Camera

I have written before about running ROS 2 on different Single Board Computers (SBCs), including an Odroid-XU4 and a Coral Edge TPU dev board. Recently I got my hands on a Raspberry Pi 4b and of course thought: “let’s put ROS 2 on it!” There are several resources on running ROS 2 on a Raspberry Pi using Ubuntu as your OS, but I started out with Raspberry Pi OS (formally known as Raspbian), and I will describe here how to install ROS 2 onto that. And, as a bonus, I will also show how to use the Raspberry Pi Camera Module V2 in this set up. Let’s get started! ...

How to Run ROS 2 Foxy on a Coral TPU

When I created a robot 15 years ago out of PVC tubes, acrylic plates, a very heavy laptop and my mother’s yoga mat, that was tasked with collecting brightly coloured balls but was more interested in plain white walls, I could have only dreamt of the Computer Vision possibilities crammed into affordable credit card sized boards available nowadays. Google’s Coral board is one of these, equipped with a Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) that is optimised to run modern deep neural networks very efficiently. ...

How to run ROS 2 on an Odroid-XU4

The second generation of the Robot Operating System (ROS) is steadily maturing. Although there are still plenty of features outstanding on the official roadmap, ROS 2 has by now had its first official Long Term Support (LTS) release, Dashing Diademata. This release, and even more so the currently latest release, Eloquent Elusor, is now at a stage where it can comfortably be used as the base of new robotics projects. In my RoboCup team, the Bold Hearts, we are now using ROS 2 on our robots. They were originally based on ROBOTIS’s DARwIn-OP platform, but have undergone several upgrades over the years. One of these is that they currently use the Odroid-XU4 as their main computation device: an 8-core big.LITTLE 32 bit ARM single-board computer (SBC), not too dissimilar from a Raspberry Pi, with quite some performance. Getting started with ROS 2 on one of these is as simple as following the steps below. ...