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There's a few alternatives. Zenoh [1] is an up-and-coming distributed middleware. ROS2 is actually adding it as an alternative to DDS [2]. LCM [3] is another m

by ubj 2y ago

There's a few alternatives. Zenoh [1] is an up-and-coming distributed middleware. ROS2 is actually adding it as an alternative to DDS [2]. LCM [3] is another middleware that has been around for a while. [1]: https://zenoh.io/ https://zenoh.io/ [2]: https://newsroom.eclipse.org/eclipse-newsletter/2023/october/eclipse-zenoh-selected-alternate-ros-2-middleware https://newsroom.eclipse.org/eclipse-newsletter/2023/october... [3]: https://lcm-proj.github.io/lcm/ https://lcm-proj.github.io/lcm/

ModernMech 2y ago
Those aren't really ROS alternatives though, as they seem to offer just the message passing layer, which is one of the best features of ROS, but it's not really enough in isolation from the other good features.
- moffkalast 2y ago
  People forget that ROS isn't really about the IPC or the build system or the networking. Ok it is about those things, but fundamentally it's about standardization. Grab any lidar driver and it'll output a LaserScan. Every wheeled robot will send out Odometry, anything from a submarine to a flying drone to an agv will respond to a Twist message, every robot will have a central coordinate frame called "base_link", etc. The cross ecosystem interoperability is frankly insane and the main perk of it all. It makes building things easy when you don't have to deal with writing adapters every single damn time. This is why ROS 2 is currently such a step backwards because it fragments the ecosystem in DDS compatibility, making sure that no two packages will necessarily be able to run concurrently.