RosLibRust

This package aims to provide a convenient "async first" library for interacting with ROS.

Currently this packaged provides support for both ROS1 native communication (TCPROS) and rosbridge's protocol which provides support for both ROS1 and ROS2 albeit with some overhead.

Information about the rosbridge protocol can be found here.

Note on documentation: All information about the crate itself (examples, documentation, tutorials, etc.) lives in the source code and can be viewed on docs.rs. This readme is for "Meta" information about developing for the crate.

Fully Supported via rosbridge: Noetic, Galactic, Humble, Iron.

Fully Supported via ROS1 native: Noetic

Code Generation of ROS Messages

The crates roslibrust_codegen and roslibrust_codegen_macro support code generation in Rust for ROS1 and ROS2 message, service, and action files. Many of the examples use the macro for convenience. find_and_generate_ros_messages is a macro which accepts an optional list of paths relative to the project workspace directory and will additionally check the ROS_PACKAGE_PATH environment variable for paths to ROS packages.

It's used like this:

roslibrust_codegen_macro::find_and_generate_ros_messages!("assets/ros1_common_interfaces/std_msgs");

Code generation can also be done with a build.rs script using the same code generation backend called by the macro. See the contents of example_package for a detailed example of how this can be done. While the proc_macros are extremely convenient for getting started there is currently no (good) way for a proc_macro to inform the compiler that it needs to be re-generated when an external file changes. Using a build script requires more setup, but can correctly handling re-building when message files are edited.

Generated message types are compatible with both the ROS1 native and RosBridge backends.

Roadmap

Feature	rosbridge	ROS1	ROS2
examples	✅	✅	x
message_gen	✅	✅	✅
advertise / publish	✅	✅	x
unadvertise	✅	✅	x
subscribe	✅	✅	x
unsubscribe	✅	✅	x
services	✅	✅	x
actions	(codgen of message types only)
rosapi	✅	x	x
TLS / wss://	Should be working, untested	N/A	N/A

Upcoming features in rough order:

• Ability to write generic clients via ROS trait
• In memory backend that can be used for testing
• Support for parameter server

Contributing

Contribution through reporting of issues encountered and implementation in PRs is welcome! Before landing a large PR with lots of code implemented, please open an issue if there isn't a relevant one already available and chat with a maintainer to make sure the design fits well with all supported platforms and any in-progress implementation efforts.

Minimum Supported Rust Version / MSRV

We don't have an official MSRV yet.

Due to cargo 1.72 enabling "doctest-in-workspace" by default it is recommended to use Rust 1.72+ for development. Previous rust versions are support but will require some incantations when executing doctests.

The experimental topic_provider feature currently relies on async fn in traits from Rust 1.75. When that feature standardizes that will likely become our MSRV.

Running Tests

There are various unit tests and integration tests behind feature flags. For tests with ROS1, both through rosbridge and native clients, you'll need a locally running rosbridge_websocket node and rosmaster. Then run with cargo test --features "ros1_test ros1". For tests with ROS2, you'll need a running rosbridge server, then run with cargo test --features "ros2_test". You can find relevant Dockerfiles and docker compose configurations udner the docker directory.