
Robot Operating System 2.0: Ardent Apalone Release - bmc7505
https://github.com/ros2/ros2/releases/tag/release-ardent
======
Animats
Good to see that coming out the door. It's still in beta, though.

They need to get their act together and get this into the standard Ubuntu
repositories for installation using the standard GUI tools. Or install into
non-system folders. ROS is notorious for breaking Ubuntu auto-updating because
of bad packaging.

I tried following their instructions, and the install didn't happen because,
for some reason, their repository wasn't recognized. Don't have time to fix
this; will wait until they're out of beta.

ROS has historically been such an install pain that some people install it in
a Docker container. That has its own headaches.

~~~
cbHXBY1D
I haven't used ROS in two years but it was such a painful experience at the
time. We were stuck on an old, old build because we found that some of the
drivers we used didn't work on anything newer. I spent so much time trying
different Ubuntu versions paired with different ROS versions.

And this was with pretty popular consumer hardware. I can't imagine the
experience with anything exotic.

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Seanny123
Did they fix the build system or are they still going to use the weird catkin
build system? I read the article, but it didn't mention it. I ask, because it
has been consistently the most difficult part of using ROS for myself and
everyone I know. Alternatively, is the difficulty I've experienced more of an
indication of build systems being complicated things?

~~~
ratliffchrisb
They are moving to ament.
[http://design.ros2.org/articles/ament.html](http://design.ros2.org/articles/ament.html)

I think a lot of the difficulty is in the build system being federated. This
makes it complex as it supports multiple build other systems for other ROS
packages. I haven't looked into it much yet, but I'm curious about ROS 2 also
supporting ROS on smaller micros now. I think this would make the build system
more complex.

Modifying the how the devel space is handled seems like an improvement and
making it more modular seems like it should help though.

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cdancette
Changelog between ros 1 and ros 2 here
[http://design.ros2.org/articles/changes.html](http://design.ros2.org/articles/changes.html),
and you can find the general explanation for ros 2 design here
[http://design.ros2.org/](http://design.ros2.org/)

~~~
ansgri
As a lead developer in a ROS-based project, I'm not sure whether we'll adopt
ROS2 in a couple of years or abandon it altogether. It seems like with ROS2
supporting integrated CMake builds will be a lot more difficult, and in our
company we strongly prefer monorepos and integrated builds due to ease of
debugging and optimization.

On the other hand, ROS2 aims to provide RTOS support and pluggable transport
layers, which are rather serious benefits.

Also, their decision to abandon XML-based roslaunch is the right one: we had
to roll out our own startup infrastructure as well, as it's much more
convenient to have a definite init order with sequential checks and waits e.g.
for hardware availability.

~~~
ratliffchrisb
I think a lot of work has been undertaken for a ROS1->2 bridge. It should be
feasible to use this to have ROS on a micro and bridge to an existing ROS 1
code base.

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ehead
Has anyone played with the RTOS implementation? I used ROS a ton for my thesis
but was always left longing for true real time actions. I'd love to hear the
story of someone who has tried to do a real project with it.

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gtirloni
> Why ROS 2.0?
> [http://design.ros2.org/articles/why_ros2.html](http://design.ros2.org/articles/why_ros2.html)

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Gys
ROS = Robot Operating System

