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:

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.