Roadmap for ROS2 with microdds having MAVROS functionalities

ROS / MAVROS / MicroDDS
1

I was using PX4 with ROS1 and the MAVROS/MAVLink bridge which offers a lot of functionalities such as:

  1. publishing setpoints
  2. subscribing to various setpoints type (attitude, angular velocity, linear velocity, …)
  3. change PX4 parameters
  4. change message frequency
  5. and more

Recently, I have been considering moving to ROS2. Although the PX4 documentation is currently discussing the microRTPS bridge, I found out the latest main branch uses microdds and the documentation is work in progress.

From my preliminary testing, I saw all uorb topics are not integrated and some functionalities are not yet present (e.g 2. subscribing to various setpoints type (attitude, angular velocity, linear velocity, …) and 3. change PX4 parameters).

I wanted to ask if there is a roadmap for integrating those functionalities and an estimated time of arrival?

2

I took a look at the px4_msgs package and saw there is no notes on maintaining ABI compatibility of the messages with respect to ROS2 messages. As a ROS2 developer, I wouldn’t know how to develop against the PX4 platform if the message definitions keep changing within an LTS ROS2 release.

This is an issue not only for breaking downstream packages that want to consume px4_msgs in their code, but also for any data collected (ROS2 bags) that becomes invalidated each time the messages have a breaking change.

Aside from implementing the actual features, I think a decision on whether PX4 will integrate with ROS2 following this REP-147 would be very beneficial, and a plan on how compatibility will be maintained.