We’re happy to announce that the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF), the leader in supporting the development of open source software and hardware platforms for robotics, made available a native integration of Zenoh in ROS 2.
To begin with, this integration is available as an experimental release, for the ROS 2 releases Jazzy Jalisco, Rolling Ridley and Iron Irwini.
After thorough consideration, OSRF chose Zenoh to complement the existing support for DDS following a rigorous investigation. It determined that Zenoh is the best potential fit for the needs of ROS users. As a result, it meets the key requirements for current and future robotics applications.
“Zenoh has the potential to resolve difficulties our users have faced in working with DDS middlewares in certain scenarios, such as corporate networks that block the basic network protocol DDS implementations require to function, and globe-spanning remote robotics applications. We look forward to the RMW being well-tested by the community over the next year as we work towards its first full release in 2025,”
Moreover, OSRF has a very large, broad community including roboticists from Fortune 500 organizations and startups. Additionally, it includes academic research labs, government agencies, and hobbyist communities.
In surveying this community, OSRF learned that its users overwhelmingly favoured Zenoh as the top middleware alternative over other options.
“I am impressed with how quickly the ROS team developed the Zenoh RMW for ROS 2. I look forward to working with the ROS team and the entire ROS community to quickly mature the support and use it as a base for further innovations.”
Zenoh is a pub/sub/query protocol designed to unify data in motion, data at rest, and computations. The adoption is swiftly growing in robotics, automotive, Web 3.0 applications and systems which operate on the cloud-to-device continuum. The Blue Dragon protocol is open-source and hosted as part of the Eclipse Foundation.