Skip to main content

A Robotic Dream Team: ROS 2 and Cyclone DDS

The Eclipse Cyclone DDS team has been hard at work recently; this got them noticed in a big way. Open Robotics recently declared that Eclipse Cyclone DDS will be a tier one middleware in ROS 2 Foxy Fitzroy! Eclipse Cyclone DDS, an implementation of the Data Distribution Service standard under the stewardship of the DDS Foundation and the Object Management Group (OMG), is a project of the Eclipse IoT and OpenADx working groups.

Some of the key benefits of Cyclone DDS include:
  • Secure ROS 2 (SROS2) integration & testing contributed by Eclipse IoT member Canonical
  • Implementation of DDS Security contributed, tested, optimized and ready for ROS users. The team backported this feature to the ROS 2 Dashing and Eloquent releases!
  • Full coverage of QoS supported by ROS including lifespan and deadline 
  • New high-speed RMW serializer contributed by Rover Robotics
  • Ability to discover a single robot among a swarm of 1,000+ (thanks to iRobot for the use case!)
  • Too many performance and quality improvements to list but you can see them here and here
Cyclone DDS is currently one of the Eclipse projects with the highest adoption rates. Its proud public adopters are just the tip of the iceberg.

Congratulations to the team on this significant milestone!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

[Guest Post] Edge Computing and Open Source in Europe: A New Hope

This is a guest post by Alberto P. Martí, VP of Open Source Community Relations at OpenNebula . For everyone in the European cloud market with a passion for open source, these are exciting times. For years, tech journalists and market analysts have been predicting that edge computing was going to bring a paradigm shift to the cloud, and now we are starting to see the form that this disruption is going to take—at least in Europe. Technically speaking, there is little doubt that deploying applications and processing data at the edge comes with a number of benefits, and not only in terms of reducing latency and improving user experience. We are talking about expanding service availability to better deal with infrastructure incidents, reducing data transfers and the energy consumption and security risks associated with them, as well as minimizing vendor dependency by expanding the number of available providers. It comes as no surprise that the European Union has identified edge computing a

Eclipse IDE for Embedded Developers Now Runs on the Raspberry Pi!

The Eclipse IDE is the project that started it all for the Eclipse Foundation . From the beginning, Eclipse IDE was meant to run on multiple platforms; it now supports Linux, Mac OS and Microsoft Windows. Since it is written in Java, it also supports multiple processor architectures. However, support for 32-bit architectures has been dropped in version 2018-12. This meant recent versions of the IDE would not run on the Raspberry Pi anymore. The introduction of the Raspberry Pi 4 in June 2019 gave hope to Eclipse on Pi fans. With its 64-bit quad core ARM Cortex-A72, the Pi 4 was a good hardware platform to work with. It became even more attractive in May 2020, with the introduction of the 8Gb variant. The Eclipse community took notice of those developments. Version 2020-09 of Eclipse IDE now ships with experimental support for 64-bit ARM (aarch64) on Linux.  Those developments mean embedded and IoT developers can now work on the Raspberry Pi 4 by installing the plugins provided by the 

The Edge of Things: A Name That Means a Lot of Things

I have a fantastic job. When people ask what I do, I say I manage IoT and Edge Computing programs at the Eclipse Foundation. This is true yet is an oversimplification. What I actually do is a bit more complicated than that. I need to keep an eye on over fifty relevant Eclipse open-source projects. At the same time, I help animate three distinct communities: the Eclipse IoT , Edge Native , and Sparkplug working groups. All three have something to do with IoT and Edge Computing, each with a slightly different angle. And here is my problem: it is hard to convey all the nuances of everything our IoT and Edge community does in a single word. IoT, of course, includes Edge Computing. Deploying compute, storage, and networking resources as close to the source of the data as possible makes complete sense. However, Edge Computing is an architecture that applies to many other use cases, such as gaming or videoconferencing. None of those two concepts completely encloses the other. And no single w