Roadmap

This page describes planned work for ROS 2. The set of planned features and development efforts should provide insight into the overall direction of ROS 2. If you would like to see other features on the roadmap, please get in touch with us at info@openrobotics.org.

Humble Roadmap

Humble Hawksbill is the ROS 2 release expected in May 2022. See release for a detailed timeline.

The items in the roadmap below are the major features being worked on by the ROS 2 community. The “Size” is an estimated size of the task, where Small means person-days to complete, Medium means person-weeks to complete, and Large means person-months to complete.

If you are working on a feature for ROS 2 Humble and would like to have it listed, please open a pull request to ROS 2 Documentation. If you’d like to take on one of these tasks, please get in touch with us.

Task	Size	Owner	Expected Completion
Identify if messages have changed over time	Large	Apex.AI
Rosbag2 playback controlled by /clock sim time	Small	AWS	Q3 2021
Rosbag2 “Snapshot mode”	Medium	AWS	Q3 2021
Multi-threaded Executor for rclc	Medium	Bosch	1st quarter 2022
Configurable Executor thread priorities for rclcpp	Medium	Bosch	1st quarter 2022
Various small improvements to Diagnostics	Small	Bosch	1st quarter 2022
Performance improvements: Implement events executor in rclcpp	Large	iRobot	4th quarter 2021
Performance improvements: Improve intra-process optimization and loaned message APIs	Medium	iRobot	4th quarter 2021
Developer experience: Better integration of ROS 2 repos with package managers and documentation for building/running ROS 2 applications.	Large	iRobot	2nd quarter 2022
Develop a system level QoS/network debugging tool	Large	Open Robotics
Documentation: Add Python API support to rosdoc2	Medium	Open Robotics	4th quarter 2021
Documentation: Support inter-package linking for rosdoc2 buildfarm jobs	Small	Open Robotics	1st quarter 2022
Documentation: Upload C++ API documentation for core packages to docs site	Medium	Open Robotics	4th quarter 2021
Humble Release	Large	Open Robotics	2nd quarter 2022
Improve service and action reliability for frequencies greater than 10Hz	Medium	Open Robotics	1st quarter 2022
Improve RViz2 stability	Medium	Open Robotics	4th quarter 2021
Middleware: Default middleware selection	Medium	Open Robotics	Complete
Middleware: Report on feasibility of using Zenoh as an RMW	Medium	Open Robotics	Complete
Overlays work to override any package in a dependency tree	Large	Open Robotics	2nd quarter 2022
Revamp launch testing	Large	Open Robotics	Complete
Filter topic messages by content in rclcpp	Large	Sony	1st quarter 2022
Wait for an acknowledgment from a reliable publisher in rclcpp and rclpy	Small	Sony	Complete

Additional project-specific roadmaps can be found in the links below:

• MoveIt2: https://moveit.ros.org/documentation/contributing/roadmap/

• Nav2: https://navigation.ros.org/roadmap/roadmap.html

Planned releases

Please see the Distributions page for the timeline of and information about future distributions.

Contributing to ROS 2

Looking for something to work on, or just want to help out? Here are a few resources to get you going.

1. The Contributing guide describes how to make a contribution to ROS 2.

2. Check out the list of Feature Ideas for inspiration.

3. For more information on the design of ROS 2 please see design.ros2.org.

4. The core code for ROS 2 is in the ros2 GitHub organization.

5. The Discourse forum/mailing list for discussing ROS 2 design is ng-ros.

6. Questions should be asked on ROS answers, make sure to include at least the ros2 tag and the rosdistro version you are running, e.g. humble.