Zetta Radio: A Journey from Smart Cities to Robotics and Beyond with Zenoh

The episode begins by taking listeners back to 2008 when the wings of Zenoh first appeared. Back then, the team, including Julien, Olivier, and Luca, were working on a smart city project in Nice called Connected Boulevard, one of the first large-scale efforts involving microcontrollers and sensors to create a network for detecting parking spots and facilitating real-time communication across the city.

However, existing technologies, including DDS, struggled to support this complex, decentralized infrastructure. As a result, the team soon realized they needed a new protocol to operate across highly constrained environments and various network topologies. This led to the birth of Zenoh, an open source protocol designed to move data seamlessly from the cloud to microcontrollers.

The Evolution of Zenoh: From OCaml to Rust

As the team reflects in this episode of Zetta Radio, Zenoh’s journey was far from linear. Initially, Zenoh was written in OCaml. However, as the needs of the project evolved, so did the language behind the protocol. Zenoh transitioned to Rust, a language that offered greater safety, performance, and support for asynchronous programming—critical features for building the robust distributed systems Zenoh aimed to support.

Luca shares his perspective on this pivotal moment. Specifically, he notes that Rust’s memory safety and its ability to scale across distributed networks made it the perfect choice for Zenoh’s long-term development. Rust helped the team expand Zenoh into markets like automotive and robotics, where decentralized communication is vital.

Key Milestones and Features

One of the key milestones highlighted in this episode is the development of Pub/Sub and Query/Reply—two essential features that allow Zenoh to efficiently manage communications across networks. Julien explains how these features and Zenoh’s queryable concept solved past scalability issues. This innovation is one of the factors that sets Zenoh apart from other protocols.

Additionally, Olivier shares insights into the development of the DDS bridge, which eventually became the ROS 2 bridge—a critical tool in enabling Zenoh’s use in robotics. This feature solved major communication challenges in decentralized robotics systems, facilitating communication between robots and external systems.

What’s Coming in Zenoh 1.0.0?

The episode ends with a look into the future. Zenoh 1.0.0 is on the horizon, and the team is excited to introduce several improvements. Zenoh 1.0.0 brings shared memory support, improved routing, and new JavaScript and TypeScript APIs for Web 3.0. The team hosted a series of webinars to show you how to use the new features in your application.

Luca highlights the improvements in shared memory support, which will remove some topological constraints seen in earlier versions. Olivier discusses the introduction of interceptors for message handling, which will improve Zenoh’s performance in robotics and automotive applications.

Zenoh is ready for the Web 3.0 era. With the upcoming JavaScript and TypeScript support, Zenoh is set to play a role in decentralized web applications, extending its power beyond embedded systems into mainstream web technologies.

Tune In to Zetta Radio

This is a quick summary of this episode of Zetta Radio. It’s a deep dive into the technical journey and evolution of Zenoh. Whether you’re a developer, systems architect, or simply curious about how cutting-edge protocols are reshaping industries.

This is a conversation you don’t want to miss. Give it a listen! You can find more Zetta Radio episodes on our website.