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Roadmap

For more information on the design of ROS 2 please see design.ros2.org. The core code for ROS 2 is on the ros2 github organization. The Discourse forum/mailing list for discussing ROS 2 design is ng-ros. Questions should be asked on ROS answers, make sure to include at least the ros2 tag and the rosdistro version you are running, e.g. ardent.

Planned upcoming releases

This is a list of the features targeted for development in the future.

Subject to change.

Next release - D-turtle (June 2019)

The D-turtle meta ticket on GitHub will in the near future enumerate the ongoing high level tasks as well as references specific tickets with more details.

Future (in no specific order)

Design / Concept

  • IDL format: using IDL 4.2 to specify ROS interfaces (msgs, srvs, actions)
    • Support for non-ASCII strings in messages / services
    • Leverage new features like grouping and various annotations (comments, units)
    • Extend usage to .idl files with just constants and/or declare parameters with ranges
  • Progress on migration plan
  • Reconsider 1-to-1 mapping of ROS nodes to DDS participants
  • Uniqueness of node names
  • optional XML or YAML frontend for Python-based launch

Infrastructure and tools

  • Building
    • Support to generate “fat” packages / archives
    • Windows and Mac OS packages
  • 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.

  • Actions in Python
  • Logging improvements [* / **]
    • Configuration specified in a file
    • C++ stream operators
    • Colorize console output
  • Parameters
    • set individual parameters via command line arguments (instead of passing a yaml file)
    • Specify the value range
    • Define read-only parameters
  • Additional Graph API features [** / ***]
  • Remapping [** / ***]
    • Dynamic remapping and aliasing through a Service interface
  • Type masquerading [***]
  • Expand on real-time safety [***]
    • With FastRTPS
    • For services, clients, and parameters
    • Support deterministic ordering of executables in Executor (fair scheduling)
    • 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 dynamic [*]
    • RTI’s micro implementation [*]
    • Eclipse Cyclone DDS (former ADLINK OpenSplice) [*]
  • security improvements:
    • more granularity in security configuration (allow authentication only, authentication and encryption, etc) [*]
    • extend access control permission generation to support services [*]
    • 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

Reducing Technical Debt

  • Extend testing and resolve bugs in the current code base
    • Waitset inconsistency
    • Multi-threading problems with components
    • Reduce overhead / latency of intra-process communication
  • Fix flaky tests.
  • Ability to run (all) unit tests with tools e.g. valgrind
  • API review
  • Synchronize / reconcile design docs with the implementation.
    • Pre-release retrospective review (APIs, docs, etc.)
  • Address / classify pending tickets
  • Address TODOs in code / docs