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Zenoh

Zenoh is an open source communication protocol and middleware designed to facilitate efficient data distribution across heterogeneous systems. It provides location-transparent abstractions for high performance pub/sub and distributed queries. See also: https://zenoh.io/docs/getting-started/first-app/

Prerequisites

Have rosdep installed.

Installation packages

The rmw implementation Zenoh can be installed via binaries, recommended for stable development.

Binary packages for supported ROS 2 distributions (see distro branches) are available on respective Tier-1 platforms for the distributions. First ensure that your system is set up to install ROS 2 binaries by following the instructions here.

Then install rmw_zenoh binaries using the command

sudo apt install ros-rolling-rmw-zenoh-cpp

Build from source code

Building from source is only recommended if latest features are needed.

By default, we vendor and compile zenoh-cpp with a subset of zenoh features. The ZENOHC_CARGO_FLAGS CMake argument may be overwritten with other features included if required. See zenoh_cpp_vendor/CMakeLists.txt for more details.

  1. Clone the repository

mkdir ~/ws_rmw_zenoh/src -p && cd ~/ws_rmw_zenoh/src
git clone https://github.com/ros2/rmw_zenoh.git -b rolling

  1. Install dependencies:

cd ~/ws_rmw_zenoh
rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src --rosdistro rolling -y

  1. Build the workspace using Colcon:

source /opt/ros/rolling/setup.bash
colcon build --cmake-args -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

Switch to rmw_zenoh_cpp

Switch from other rmw to rmw_zenoh_cpp by specifying the environment variable.

export RMW_IMPLEMENTATION=rmw_zenoh_cpp

Run the talker and listener

Now run talker and listener to test Zenoh.

Start the Zenoh router

# terminal 1
source /opt/ros/rolling/setup.bash
ros2 run rmw_zenoh_cpp rmw_zenohd

Note

Without the Zenoh router, nodes will not be able to discover each other since multicast discovery is disabled by default in the node’s session config. Instead, nodes will receive discovery information about other peers via the Zenoh router’s gossip functionality.

# terminal 2
export RMW_IMPLEMENTATION=rmw_zenoh_cpp
source /opt/ros/rolling/setup.bash
ros2 run demo_nodes_cpp talker

# terminal 3
export RMW_IMPLEMENTATION=rmw_zenoh_cpp
source /opt/ros/rolling/setup.bash
ros2 run demo_nodes_cpp listener

Note

Remember to source your ROS 2 setup script before running these commands.