ROS2 Support

[SteveMacenski]

Hi,

I'm working on a book (https://miccol.github.io/posts/2021/03/callforchapters/) and we're looking to standardize around a mobile-manipulator platform to use across the different chapters (nav, manipulation, AI, etc) such that we have 1 consistent robot throughout the book. This book is being worked on as a blueprint of how to build successful robot systems in ROS2, so all of the chapters and demonstrations will make use of tools in ROS2.

As such, we'd like to use the Fetch robot as our standard platform. However we noticed there is not support yet for ROS2 in this repo. I'm not sure it would take much effort to migrate the core simulation / moveit / nav configs to ROS2 but in order to use this model, we'd need some ros2 (or foxy or what have you) branch so that our authors can use it and later readers can access it.

What is the timeline / would our desire to use the Fetch robot hopefully help push ROS2 being supported?

It could be conceivable for future fetch challenges that users will want to make use of the new Nav2 and Moveit2 features, so migrating it over to ROS2 could be very helpful in those contexts as well.

[cst0]

Rather than make a new issue I'll just piggy-back off of this one-- do developers from Zebra Technologies have any announcement on if the Fetch will ever be officially brought to ROS 2? Or any informal comments on if that's something management is interested in pursuing?