ROS2 support

[AndreasAZiegler]

As a robotics engineer, I’m working with ROS2. From an (software) engineering and research perspective, I’m quite interested in Julia however with the lack of a ROS2 client library for Julia, it’s for me currently a bit difficult to start using Julia. Is there the plan to support ROS2?

[jdlangs]

Hi Andreas, the short answer is yes, I want this package to support ROS2. I also use ROS2 at work so I have some incentive to work on it. I did do some initial prototyping work a few months ago to experiment with using librcl directly and to do Julia type generation. The basics for all that has been worked out but I haven't yet been able to get back to fleshing it out properly.

At this point, with the covid disruption, it's hard to say when I can get back into working on this package. I'm expecting to have a bit less workload come mid-summer so that might be the timeline.

[JuliusSustarevas]

Great news!
I plan to start learning Julia as I switch to ROS2 end of this year. Can't wait to try this out

[VarLad]

Any chance that ROS2 will be implemented via Cxx instead of PyCall, as was in the case of RobotOS.jl?
Is there any update on "ROS2 on Julia"?

[JinraeKim]

I'm really looking forward to use ROS2 in Julia as a newbie of both ROS2 and Julia! 😄

[VarLad]

Any update on this?

[lassepe]

@jdlangs you said you already started playing around with wrapping librcl in Julia. Do have a branch or a repo with your initial sketch? I'd be interested in doing some more poking.

[jdlangs]

@lassepe thanks for your interest here. I'm happy to make my initial work public and you can now find it on the ros2 branch. As usual, I don't expect to have much bandwidth to continue working on this currently but maybe this starting point will inspire some further efforts.