rclnet

rclnet is a fast and easy-to-use .NET wrapper over ROS 2 client library, allowing .NET applications to interact with other ROS applications.

What’s New in 2.0

• Added support for .NET 10 and changed minimum supported .NET version to 8.0
• ROS 2 Kilted Support
• ROS 2 Jazzy Support by @AlrayQiu (#39)
• Simplified message generation workflow by @ha-ves (#38)
• String pooling is now disabled by default

Features

• Completely asynchronous and async/await friendly.
• Flexible asynchronous scheduling control to fit rclnet into existing applications.
• Unified message generation for POCOs and blittable structures.
• Intuitive ROS graph querying and monitoring APIs.
• Easy-to-use POCO-based APIs.
• Fast and zero managed heap allocation APIs operating directly on native message buffers.
• Single package with runtime support for different ROS 2 distros.
• Builtin support for querying topic messages and ROS graph events with Reactive Extensions.

Supported ROS Features

| Feature | Status | Additional Information | | ———————– | —— | ——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————– | | Topics | ✅ | N/A | | Services | ✅ | N/A | | Actions | ✅ | Managed implementation. | | Clocks | ✅ | Supports external time source by setting use_sim_time to true.
CancellationTokenSources can also be configured to cancel with timeout measured by external clock. | | Timers | ✅ | N/A | | Guard Conditions | ✅ | N/A | | Events | ✅ | Event handlers can be registered via SubscriptionOptions or PublisherOptions when creating the subscirption or publisher. | | ROS Graph | ✅ | Managed implementation. | | Logging | ✅ | Supports logging to stdout, /rosout and log files. Configurable with --ros-args. | | Content Filtered Topics | ✅ | Available since humble. | Network Flow Endpoints | ✅ | Available since galactic.
Network flow endpoints of publishers and subscriptions can be retrieved via IRclPublisher.Endpoints and IRclSubscription.Endpoints property.
Unique network flow endpoints requirement can be configured when creating SubscriptionOptions and PublisherOptions.| | Service Introspection | ✅ | Available since iron. | | Parameter Service | ⚠️ | Supports loading parameters from command-line arguments and parameter files.
Locally declared parameters are exposed via Parameter API.
Parameter client is not implemented. | | Lifecycle Nodes | ❌ | N/A |

✅Supported ⚠️Partial support ❌Not supported ⏳In development

Supported Platforms

Supported .NET Versions:

• .NET 8
• .NET 9
• .NET 10

Supported ROS 2 Distributions:

• Foxy Fitzroy
• Humble Hawksbill
• Iron Irwini
• Jazzy Jalisco
• Kilted Kaiju

Supported Operating Systems:

• Ubuntu
• Windows

Should also work on macOS but untested.

Installing

Stable releases of rclnet are hosted on NuGet. You can install them using the following command:

dotnet add package Rcl.NET

Generating Messages

Preparation

rclnet does not ship with message definitions. In order to communicate with other ROS 2 nodes, you need to generate messages first.

Message definitions are .NET classes / structs, you can either include messages in a console app which runs as an ROS 2 node, or compile separately in another library.

Projects containing messages will have to meet the following requirements:

• Rcl.NET (or Rosidl.Runtime if you are not using automated codegen) NuGet package is installed.
• AllowUnsafeBlocks is set to true. This can be done by adding the following lines to the .csproj file:

    <PropertyGroup>
        <AllowUnsafeBlocks>true</AllowUnsafeBlocks>
    </PropertyGroup>
    

• Runtime marshalling for the assembly is disabled. You can add the following line to somewhere in the source code of the project:

    [assembly: System.Runtime.CompilerServices.DisableRuntimeMarshalling]
    

To generate messages, you also need to add a ros2cs.spec file to somewhere in the project (usually the project root). A ros2cs.spec file contains configurations such as output directory and where to find packages, see here for detailed explanations.

Generating messages using automated codegen

Now simply build the project and message definitions should appear in a directory named Ros2csGeneratedInterfaces.

The path to the spec file and output directory can also be customized using Ros2csSpecFile and Ros2csOutputDir MSBuild property, e.g.:

```xml

File truncated at 100 lines see the full file