Bazel rules for ROS 2

This repo provides functionality to build and use ROS 2 with Bazel.

Prerequisites

You will need to install Bazel, see here. Besides Bazel, you will need a C++ compiler and a Python 3 interpreter.

And no, you don't have to install any ROS 2 packages via apt.

The code is developed and tested on Ubuntu 20.04 with Python 3.8.

What works?

Available features:

• Building of C++ and Python nodes.
• C/C++/Python code generation for interfaces (messages, services and actions).
• Defining ROS 2 deployments with ros2_launch Bazel macro.
• Defining ROS 2 tests with ros2_test Bazel macro.
• Defining ROS 2 plugins with ros2_plugin Bazel macro.
• CycloneDDS (default) and FastDDS middleware are supported.
  • Zero copy transport via shared memory backend (iceoryx) for CycloneDDS.
• Utilities:
  • foxglove_bridge for visualization and debugging
  • ros2_bag for handling rosbags
  • ros2_lifecycle for handling node lifecycle
  • ros2_node for handling nodes
  • ros2_param for handling parameters
  • ros2_service for handling services
  • ros2_topic for handling topics
  • xacro for Xacro to URDF conversion

Please take a look at the examples folder to get started.

ROS 2 packages are by default locked to versions from release-humble-20230614.

NOTE: Unlike ROS genmsg which refuses to generate code if the deps between interface targets are not set correctly, code generation for ROS 2 seems to not care about this. If the deps are not correctly set, you'll only see failures during compilation of the generated code.

Alternatives

For alternative approaches, see:

• ApexAI/rules_ros
• RobotLocomotion/drake-ros/bazel_ros2_rules, which includes a brief analysis of this and other approaches.