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Beta 3 (codename ‘r2b3’; September 2017)

Supported Platforms

We support ROS 2 Beta 3 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 as well as documentation).

Features

Improvements since Beta 2 release

  • Execution model in Python, many fixes to memory management in Python C extension
  • Experimental rewrite of ros_control
  • Exposure of DDS implementation-specific symbols to users (for FastRTPS and Connext) (see example)
  • Logging API in Python
  • Fixed several memory leaks and race conditions in various packages
  • Readded support for OpenSplice (on Linux and Windows atm) provided by PrismTech
  • Use bloom (without patches) to make ROS 2 releases

New demo application

  • HSR demo
    • Remote control a HSR robot using a ROS 2 joystick controller
    • Running the ros1_bridge in a Docker container on the HSR (since the robot is running ROS 1 on Ubuntu Trusty)
    • Run a ROS 2 development version of rviz to visualize sensor data from the robot etc. (see video)

Selected features from previous Alpha/Beta releases

For the complete list, see earlier release notes.

  • 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
    • PrismTech OpenSplice: see limitations below
  • 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++ and Python)
  • 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

  • On Windows Python launch files might hang when trying to abort using Ctrl-C (see issue). In order to continue using the shell which is blocked by the hanging command you might want to end the hanging Python process using the process monitor.
  • OpenSplice support is currently not available for MacOS. Also access to native handles is not yet implemented.
  • Using Connext it is currently not allowed for two topics with the same base name but different namespaces to have a different type (see issue).