Roadmap¶

Design / Concept¶

• IDL format

  • Leverage new features like grouping constants into enums

  • Extend usage to .idl files with just constants and/or declare parameters with ranges

  • Revisit constraints of IDL interface naming, see ros2/design#220

• Progress on migration plan

• Uniqueness of node names, see ros2/design#187

• Specific “API” of a node in terms of topics / services / etc. in a descriptive format, see ros2/design#266

Infrastructure and tools¶

• Building

  • Consolidate build.ros2.org and ci.ros2.org

  • Provision macOS

  • Windows and Mac OS packages

  • Support profiles in colcon

• Documentation

  • Improve documentation platform

  • Support for doc jobs on the ROS 2 buildfarm

  • Consider consolidating with design.ros2.org

  • Provide three different kinds of content:

    • “demos” to show features and cover them with tests

    • “examples” to show a simple/minimalistic usage which might have multiple ways to do something

    • “tutorials” which contain more comments and anchors for the wiki (teaching one recommended way)

New features¶

The trailing stars indicate the rough effort: 1 star for small, 2 stars for medium, 3 stars for large.

• Logging improvements [* / **]

  • Configuration specified in a file

  • Per-logger configuration (enabling e.g. rqt_logger_level)

• Time related

  • Support rate and sleep based on clock

• Parameters

  • enforce type

• Additional Graph API features [** / ***]

  • Introspect QoS setting for all (especially remote) topics

  • a la ROS 1 Master API: https://wiki.ros.org/ROS/Master_API

  • Event-based notification

  • Requires knowledge of the rmw interface which needs to be extended

• Executor

  • Performance improvements (mostly around the waitset)

  • Deterministic ordering (fair scheduling)

  • Work with callback groups

  • Decouple waitables

• Message generation

  • Catch-up message generation for languages not support out-of-the-box

  • Mangle field names in message to avoid language specific keywords

  • Improve generator performance by running them in the same Python interpreter

• Launch

  • Support use case of using xacro to perform substitutions before passing the result containing parameters

  • Use pytest for launch testing

  • Support for launching multi-node executables (i.e. manual composition)

  • Extend launch XML/YAML support: events and event handlers, tag namespaces and aliasing

• Rosbag

  • Support recording services (and actions)

• ros1_bridge

  • Support bridging actions

• RMW configuration

  • Unified standard way of configuring the middleware

• Remapping [** / ***]

  • Dynamic remapping and aliasing through a Service interface

• Type masquerading [***]

  • a la ROS 1’s message traits: https://wiki.ros.org/roscpp/Overview/MessagesSerializationAndAdaptingTypes

  • Requires knowledge of the typesupport system

• Expand on real-time safety [***]

  • With Fast RTPS

  • For services, clients, and parameters

  • Expose more quality of service parameters related to real-time performance

  • Real-time-safe intra-process messaging

• Multi-robot supporting features and demos [***]

  • Undesired that all nodes across all robots share the same domain (and discover each other)

  • Design how to “partition” the system

• Implement C client library rclc [**]

• Support more DDS / RTPS implementations:

  • Connext 6, see ros2/rmw_connext#375

  • Connext dynamic [*]

  • RTI’s micro implementation [*]

• security improvements:

  • more granularity in security configuration (allow authentication only, authentication and encryption, etc.) [*]

  • integrate DDS-Security logging plugin (unified way to aggregate security events and report them to the users through a ROS interface) [**]

  • key storage security (right now, keys are just stored in the filesystem) [**]

  • more user friendly interface (make it easier to specify security config). Maybe a Qt GUI? This GUI could also assist in distributing keys somehow. [***]

  • A way to say “please secure this running system” with some UI that would auto-generate keys and policies for everything that is currently running. [***]

  • If there are hardware-specific features for securing keys or accelerating encryption/signing messages, that could be interesting to add to DDS/RTPS implementations that don’t use it already. [***]

Port of existing ROS 1 functionality¶

• Perception metapackage

  • Image pipeline

  • Perception PCL

• MoveIt

  • MoveIt Maintainers are tracking: https://discourse.ros.org/t/moveit-maintainer-meeting-recap-july-25th-2018/5504

• RQt

  • convert more plugins [* each when dependencies are available]

Reducing Technical Debt¶

• Extend testing and resolve bugs in the current code base

  • Waitset inconsistency

  • Multi-threading problems with components

• Fix flaky tests.

• Ability to run (all) unit tests with tools e.g. valgrind

• API review, specifically user-facing APIs in rclcpp and rclpy

• Refactor the rclcpp API into separate packages focused on a single aspect, rclcpp should afterward still provide the combined user-facing API

• Revisit message allocators, consider using std::polymorphic_allocator to address problems

• Modernization

  • Support/use exporting CMake targets (rather than using CMake variables like *_INCLUDE_DIRS, *_LIBRARIES)

  • Use C++17 filesystem features rather than custom code

  • Use pybind11 for rclpy

  • Move to f-strings in Python code

  • Use setup.cfg files for Python packages

• Synchronize / reconcile design docs with the implementation.

  • Pre-release retrospective review (APIs, docs, etc.)

• Address / classify pending tickets

• Address TODOs in code / docs