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A Robotic Dream Team: ROS 2 and Cyclone DDS

Monday, June 1, 2020 - 11:02 by Frédéric Desbiens
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!