ROS 2 Runtime#

The Robotics AI Suite uses the Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2) as its primary runtime execution engine, communication middleware, and lifecycle manager. ROS 2 provides the modular backbone that interconnects sensor ingestion, hardware abstraction, artificial intelligence inference, autonomous navigation, robotic manipulation, and deterministic motor control into a unified software stack.

The suite standardizes on ROS 2 Jazzy Jalisco running on Canonical Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat) across supported Intel platforms. For hardware and platform prerequisites, refer to the System Requirements.

Architecture & Core Capabilities#

ROS 2 delivers an industrial-grade, distributed architecture designed for robotics systems with demanding performance, reliability, and real-time constraints.

Publish-Subscribe, Services, and Actions#

Robotics AI Suite applications communicate across processes and distributed compute nodes using standard ROS 2 communication primitives:

  • Topics (Publish-Subscribe): Unidirectional streaming for continuous, high-throughput data such as camera video frames (sensor_msgs/Image), 3D point clouds (sensor_msgs/PointCloud2), and odometry measurements (nav_msgs/Odometry).

  • Services (Request-Response): Synchronous or asynchronous two-way communication for configuration queries, mode switches, and calibration requests.

  • Actions (Goal-Feedback-Result): Long-running preemptible task execution with real-time feedback, utilized by Nav2 navigation goals and MoveIt 2 trajectory executions.

Data Distribution Service (DDS) & Zero-Copy Transport#

Communication in ROS 2 relies on Data Distribution Service (DDS) middleware implementations such as Fast DDS and Cyclone DDS. The Robotics AI Suite takes advantage of:

  • Intra-Process Communication (IPC): Minimizes serialization and socket overhead by using shared memory and loaned messages (rclcpp::LoanedMessage) to achieve zero-copy data passing between co-located nodes. This is critical for high-resolution vision and volumetric point-cloud pipelines.

  • Quality of Service (QoS) Tuning: Configurable reliability (reliable vs. best-effort), durability (transient local vs. volatile), history depth, and deadline/liveliness policies to prioritize critical motor control commands over best-effort diagnostic telemetry.

Managed Node Lifecycles & Composable Nodes#

  • Lifecycle Nodes (rclcpp_lifecycle): Provides deterministic state-machine management (unconfigured, inactive, active, finalized). This allows orchestrating complex robotic graphs where sensor drivers must reach active states before navigation or AI perception nodes begin execution.

  • Composable Nodes & Component Containers: Packages multiple functional nodes into dynamic shared libraries loaded inside a single runtime process container (rclcpp_components), eliminating process boundaries while preserving modular code organization.

Robotics AI Suite Integration#

ROS 2 serves as the central orchestration bus connecting all components in the Robotics AI Suite:

  • AI Perception & Inference: Interconnects camera feeds with the OpenVINO™ Toolkit inference engine. Vision nodes publish inference bounding boxes, segmented masks, and classification outputs onto standard ROS 2 topics for downstream planning.

  • Sensors: Interfaces with Sensors including RealSense depth cameras (realsense2_camera), industrial USB/GMSL vision sensors, and 2D/3D LiDARs.

  • Navigation: Powers the Nav2 stack, augmented by Intel-optimized components such as the ITS Path Planner, Fast Mapping, and Robot Re-localization.

  • Manipulation: Integrates MoveIt 2 and MoveIt 2 Servo for Cartesian velocity jog and trajectory execution on multi-axis robotic arms.

  • Real-Time Determinism: Operates alongside Real-time Linux PREEMPT_RT kernels and fieldbuses such as the IgH EtherCAT Master Stack to execute hard real-time control loops.

  • Simulation: Enables digital-twin testing with Gazebo Simulation for full software-in-the-loop (SITL) validation before physical hardware deployment.

Getting Started with ROS 2#

Installation#

ROS 2 Jazzy is included by default when configuring a target system using the Robotics AI Suite:

Environment Setup#

To initialize the ROS 2 environment in your terminal session, source the setup script:

source /opt/ros/jazzy/setup.bash

To automatically configure every new shell, append the command to your ~/.bashrc:

echo "source /opt/ros/jazzy/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc

Network Domain Isolation (ROS_DOMAIN_ID)#

When multiple robots or development workstations share the same local network, isolate their DDS message traffic by assigning a distinct ROS_DOMAIN_ID (integer between 0 and 101):

export ROS_DOMAIN_ID=42

Note

Assign each physical robot or independent simulation session a unique ROS_DOMAIN_ID to prevent node collisions and cross-talk on the local subnet.

Verifying the Runtime#

Verify your ROS 2 runtime and environment configuration:

  1. Check runtime environment health:

    ros2 doctor

  2. Test communication between two nodes:

    In one terminal, start a publisher:

    ros2 run demo_nodes_cpp talker

    In a second terminal, start a subscriber:

    ros2 run demo_nodes_py listener

  3. Inspect active nodes and topics:

    ros2 node list
ros2 topic list

Hardware Blueprints & Solutions#

Explore how the ROS 2 runtime drives end-to-end hardware solutions and reference applications:

Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR)

Deploy ROS 2 Jazzy navigation, RTAB-Map SLAM, and sensor pipelines on mobile robot platforms.

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Stationary Arm

Implement vision-guided pick-and-place workflows with MoveIt 2 Servo and Universal Robots manipulators.

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Humanoid Robot

Run Agentic ROS frameworks, model predictive control (MPC), and high-frequency LiDAR odometry.

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RealSense Camera with ROS 2

Stream color, depth, and point cloud data from RealSense cameras to ROS 2 topics and RViz2.

clickable cards