Status Update: 2023-08-16

[haixuanTao]

🔥

[haixuanTao]

dora: More Types! 😍

• See: Adding support for Arrow List(*) for Python #337
• This is an intermediate step to support even more types like nested Array, Struct, Mapping ...
• To support those higher level types, we will need to support nested data, and to do this, we might need to transform arrow multiple buffers into one buffer.
• Removed capnproto dependencies.

Next steps:

• Add support for downcasting input byte arrays to arrow data in Rust node/operator APIs (still &[u8] based right now)
• Allow sending arrow data as outputs in Rust node/operators APIs
  • Ideally without copying the data
• Transform DDS types to arrow types and vice versa in dora-ros2-bridge
• Verify types at runtime → error on type mismatch, instead of creating garbage data
• Specify type information in dataflow YAML file and check for type mismatch on dora check
• Add support for static input and output types in Rust APIs
  • Idea: Use a proc macro to autogenerate Input and Output enums at compile time
  • Use these Input and Output types in send and receive functions (instead of [u8] data)
  • Encode the input and output types in the binary → allows dora check to verify it against the types specified in the dataflow YAML file

Minor change

• Slight performance optimization: Use serde_bytes to serialize Vec<u8> #336

[haixuanTao]

dora-ros2-bridge

• WIP Arrow Types. See: https://github.com/dora-rs/dora-ros2-bridge/tree/arrow-type
• WIP Dora-ROS2-merged stream for Python

[haixuanTao]

dora-Cambridge Proroklab Meet Up

-> Building swarm of smart drones using NVIDIA Orin and wifi.
-> Target use is distributed robotic with AI.
-> Having challenges with traffic management, critical #packets/s load, and ROS2.
-> Wifi-based communication → custom collision avoidance needed
-> Also have legacy ROS2 software.
-> Might be interested in being able to integrate custom middleware.
-> Missing features in dora: types, logging, deployment across many machines, packet priority (don't drop control messages on load)
-> Shared memory is not useful to them as they're going though the network anyway → cheap (de)serialization is required

[haixuanTao]

Reached out to the Zenoh team, and ask if Zenoh would help with those challenges.
They said that Zenoh should handle better Swarm of robots compared to DDS.