14. ROS 2 using Fast DDS middlewareΒΆ

Fast DDS is the default middleware implementation in the Open Source Robotic Fundation (OSRF) Robot Operating System ROS 2.

ROS 2 is a state-of-the-art software for robot engineering which consists of a set of free software libraries and tools for building robot applications. This section presents some use cases and shows how to take full advantage of Fast DDS wide set of capabilities in a ROS 2 project.

The interface between the ROS 2 stack and Fast DDS is provided by a ROS 2 package rmw_fastrtps. This package is available in all ROS 2 distributions, both from binaries and from sources. rmw_fastrtps actually provides not one but two different ROS 2 middleware implementations, both of them using Fast DDS as middleware layer: rmw_fastrtps_cpp and rmw_fastrtps_dynamic_cpp. The main difference between the two is that rmw_fastrtps_dynamic_cpp uses introspection type support at run time to decide on the serialization/deserialization mechanism, while rmw_fastrtps_cpp uses its own type support, which generates the mapping for each message type at build time. The default ROS 2 RMW implementation is rmw_fastrtps_cpp. However, it is still possible to select rmw_fastrtps_dynamic_cpp by using the environment variable RMW_IMPLEMENTATION:

  1. Exporting RMW_IMPLEMENTATION environment variable:

    export RMW_IMPLEMENTATION=rmw_fastrtps_dynamic_cpp

  2. When launching your ROS 2 application:

    RMW_IMPLEMENTATION=rmw_fastrtps_dynamic_cpp ros2 run <package> <application>