ROS 2 Iron Irwini (codename “iron”; May, 2023)

Iron Irwini is the ninth release of ROS 2. What follows is highlights of the important changes and features in Iron Irwini since the last release.

Supported Platforms

Iron Irwini is primarily supported on the following platforms:

Tier 1 platforms:

TBD

Tier 2 platforms:

TBD

Tier 3 platforms:

TBD

For more information about RMW implementations, compiler / interpreter versions, and system dependency versions see REP 2000.

Installation

To come.

New features in this ROS 2 release

ros2topic

now as keyword for builtin_interfaces.msg.Time and auto for std_msgs.msg.Header

ros2 topic pub now allows to set a builtin_interfaces.msg.Time message to the current time via the now keyword. Similarly, a std_msg.msg.Header message will be automatically generated when passed the keyword auto. This behavior matches that of ROS 1’s rostopic (http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/YAMLCommandLine#Headers.2Ftimestamps)

Related PR: ros2/ros2cli#749

Changes since the Humble release

launch_ros

Renamed classes which used Ros in the name to use ROS in line with PEP8

Classes that were changed:

• launch.actions.RosTimer -> launch.actions.ROSTimer

• launch.actions.PushRosNamespace -> launch.actions.PushROSNamespace

The old class names are still there, but will be deprecated.

Change to the default console logging file flushing behavior

This specifically applies to the default spdlog based logging backend in ROS 2, implemented in rcl_logging_spdlog. Log file flushing was changed to flush every time an «error» log message is used, e.g. each RCLCPP_ERROR() call, and also periodically every five seconds.

Previously, spdlog was used without configuring anything other than creating the sink for logging to a file.

We tested the change and did not find that the CPU overhead was significant, even on machines with slow disks (e.g. sd cards). However, if this change is causing you problems, you can get the old behavior by setting the RCL_LOGGING_SPDLOG_EXPERIMENTAL_OLD_FLUSHING_BEHAVIOR=1 environment variable.

Later we would like to have support for a full configuration file (see: https://github.com/ros2/rcl_logging/issues/92), giving you more flexibility in how the logging is done, but that is work that is only planned right now.

Therefore, this environment variable should be considered experimental and subject to removal without deprecation in the future, when we add config file support for the rcl_logging_spdlog logging backend.

See this pull request for more details about the change: https://github.com/ros2/rcl_logging/pull/95

Known Issues

To come.

Release Timeline

November, 2022 - Platform decisions

REP 2000 is updated with the target platforms and major dependency versions.

By January, 2023 - Rolling platform shift

Build farm is updated with the new platform versions and dependency versions for Iron Irwini (if necessary).

Mon. April 10, 2023 - Alpha + RMW freeze

Preliminary testing and stabilization of ROS Base 1 packages, and API and feature freeze for RMW provider packages.

Mon. April 17, 2023 - Freeze

API and feature freeze for ROS Base 1 packages in Rolling Ridley. Only bug fix releases should be made after this point. New packages can be released independently.

Mon. April 24, 2023 - Branch

Branch from Rolling Ridley. rosdistro is reopened for Rolling PRs for ROS Base 1 packages. Iron development shifts from ros-rolling-* packages to ros-iron-* packages.

Mon. May 1, 2023 - Beta

Updated releases of ROS Desktop 2 packages available. Call for general testing.

Mon. May 15, 2023 - Release Candidate

Release Candidate packages are built. Updated releases of ROS Desktop 2 packages available.

Thu. May 18, 2023 - Distro Freeze

Freeze rosdistro. No PRs for Iron on the rosdistro repo will be merged (reopens after the release announcement).

Tue. May 23, 2023 - General Availability

Release announcement. rosdistro is reopened for Iron PRs.

1(1,2,3)

The ros_base variant is described in REP 2001 (ros-base).

2(1,2)

The desktop variant is described in REP 2001 (desktop-variants).

Development progress

For progress on the development and release of Iron Irwini, see the tracking GitHub issue.

For the broad process followed by Iron Irwini, see the process description page.