We are happy to announce that ROS 2 is now available on Husky UGV – and Jackal UGV isn’t far behind! ROS 2 aims to improve on ROS 1 in novel and exciting ways in order to better meet the needs of the ROS community. These novel use cases can range from multi-robot teams to small embedded systems and even non-ideal networks. Husky UGV has been there since the beginning with ROS and we’re excited to see it grow. In fact, Husky UGV was the first non-Willow Garage robot to ever offer official ROS support!
The focus of ROS 2 has been on capitalizing on the chance to improve our user-facing APIs. A large portion of the ROS code that exists today is compatible with the client libraries as far back as the 0.4 “Mango Tango” release from February 2009, necessitating an update. However, while the essential ideas (distributed processing, anonymous publish/subscribe messaging, RPC with feedback (i.e., actions), language neutrality, system introspectability, and so on) will stay the same, ROS 2 will not be API-compatible with existing ROS code.
You may download ROS 2 on the Husky UGV by following our installation guidelines, which will walk you through installing ROS 2 Foxy or immediately upgrading from ROS 1 to ROS 2. You can find those tutorials by clicking here.