We are back from ROSCon 2022, which this year was located in beautiful Kyoto. It was a terrific conference that we’ll remember for some time. Not just because of the amazing location, but also because it has been a few years since we could meet face-to-face at ROS conferences due to the COVID pandemic.
It was outstanding to see so many kind and engaged peers at ROSCon 2022. We do sincerely hope that attendees enjoyed the “Zettlers” (as we affectionately refer to our team members) presentations and the interactions at our booth. We certainly valued and enjoyed every single exchange, question, suggestion and request. Once back at work, we had a chance to discuss it all and decided to share our key takeaways, along with some actions that we’ve decided to implement.
With a focus on the communication side of robotics, as this is really our expertise, we learned that several of you are facing challenges with Internet Scale Communication and Traffic Scheduling/Prioritization. In essence, there are more and more use cases that require Internet scale communication, as well as issues dealing with unpredictable network conditions.
Another challenge that we heard was concerning the DDS Discovery and the problems it poses over wireless networks, specifically when trying to implement robot-to-robot or robo- to- infrastructure communication.
Several of you have been addressing these specific challenges by leveraging our innovative Zenoh platform, and we are impressed with how many of you are embracing it. Some others were excited to find out about Zenoh and discover how it solves these challenges.
The top requests and comments we received concerning Zenoh were to:
- Add a Zenoh-bridge for ROS1 as it already exist for ROS2
- Add Access Control
- Develop a Zenoh RMW for ROS2
As we immensely value the community’s feedback, we have enhanced our roadmap to provide a first Zenoh-bridge for ROS1 by the end of the year.
Concerning access-control, this is on our roadmap for early 2023. Today you can still leverage Zenoh’s pluggable authentication and secure communication support.
Finally, the Zenoh RMW is something that has been discussed in the ROS2 community. There is a growing consensus that this would be extremely beneficial. ZettaScale is committed to support this effort. It is a non-trivial amount of development. We believe as a community we should find the right way of supporting Open Robotics to make this happen.
In conclusion, it was an awesome ROSCon. What made it so great was the opportunity we had to interact with you, our community. As you’ve read above, we take your feedback seriously and we react quickly. Thus stay tuned for the upcoming releases.
– The ZettaScale Team
FOLLOW
