rclnet

🚀Modern ROS 2 for .NET.

rclnet is a high-performance .NET client library for ROS 2, designed for modern .NET applications with idiomatic async APIs and low-overhead native interop.

• High-performance message interop — generated bindings map ROSIDL native message layouts directly into C#, enabling efficient bulk access with Span<T> and low-overhead native interop.
• Native message buffers — work directly with ROS message memory through RosMessageBuffer when allocation and conversion overhead matter, while keeping convenient managed message APIs for normal application code.
• Async by design — topics, services, actions, timers, and graph operations integrate naturally with async/await, Task, CancellationToken, and IAsyncEnumerable<T>.
• Managed ROS primitives — services and actions are designed around .NET abstractions, allowing asynchronous and concurrent workflows to compose naturally.
• Build once, run everywhere — run the same application binaries across supported ROS 2 releases.
• NuGet and MSBuild first — use ROS 2 from a normal .NET project with interface generation integrated into dotnet build.

What’s New in 3.0

• ROS 2 Lyrical support
• Portable ROSIDL ABI support
• Loaned message support for publishers and native subscriptions on supported middleware
• Incremental MSBuild support for generated interfaces
• .NET TimeProvider integration, including ROS-time-aware delays and timers

ROS 2 Feature Support

| Feature | Support | Notes | | ———————– | ——- | ——————————————————— | | Topics | ✅ | | | Services | ✅ | | | Actions | ✅ | Managed implementation | | Clocks & Timers | ✅ | use_sim_time supported; .NET TimeProvider integration | | Guard Conditions | ✅ | | | ROS Graph | ✅ | Managed graph API | | Logging | ✅ | stdout, /rosout, log files | | Content Filtered Topics | ✅ | Humble+ | | Network Flow Endpoints | ✅ | Humble+ | | Service Introspection | ✅ | Iron+ | | Parameters | ⚠️ | Local parameters and parameter files; no parameter client | | Lifecycle Nodes | ❌ | |

✅Supported ⚠️Partial support ❌Not supported ⏳In development

Supported Platforms

ROS 2 distributions

Legacy distributions remain compatible where practical, but new features may require a currently supported ROS 2 distribution.

.NET and operating systems

• .NET: 8, 9, 10
• Operating systems: Linux and Windows

macOS is not currently tested or officially supported.

Installing

Install rclnet from NuGet:

dotnet add package Rcl.NET

rclnet uses the native ROS 2 runtime installed on the target machine. The NuGet package contains the managed .NET libraries, but does not bundle ROS 2 itself.

Quick Start

Project setup

Generated ROS interface types use unsafe native interop. Enable unsafe code in your project:

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

Create an AssemblyInfo.cs file in the project and add:

[assembly: System.Runtime.CompilerServices.DisableRuntimeMarshalling]

Create a ros2cs.spec file in the project directory and select the ROS interface packages used by the examples below:

from-ament-index

include geometry_msgs
include sensor_msgs
include std_srvs
include example_interfaces

ros2cs runs automatically during build and generates the corresponding C# message, service and action types.

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