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Comment by abricq | Hacker News Reader

I want to make this happen ! Do you know of any good robotics framework in Rust, as of today ? I heard that ROS2 was slowly including Rust [1], not sure at how did it go. Ros would be a good entry door to sensor fusion, mapping and localization. Because all of the hardware integration / abstraction is already done (in C++). I'm curious to know if company are using this.

[1] https://github.com/ros2-rust/ros2_rust

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You can also check https://github.com/sequenceplanner/r2r for another example of ROS2 bindings (using in production at work for a couple of ROS nodes).

But TBH, in a Rust world, it’s worth revisiting the assumptions behind the ROS node architecture, since Rust is so strong at scaling to large monolithic applications (due to the strict hierarchical code patterns it encourages).

A transitional Rust approach, that doesn't try to reimplement everything from scratch, could do something like a strangler pattern: Take each ROS node, run them separately in “jails” with a Rust API around each one, then implement the plumbing/management logic in pure Rust.

Yeah the ROS node architecture sucks. However, one reason for that design was so that you can run ROS on distributed systems where things communicate to each other over the network.

Actually another reason people use the architecture is for process level isolation, i.e. limiting the blast radius of memory corruption. But in both cases, Im sure you could design an ergonomic RPC framework that takes care of offloading computation mostly transparently behind the scenes :)

Maybe the folks at Rerun [1] know something about it? I imagine at least some of their customers are Rust robotics shops.

[1] https://github.com/rerun-io/rerun

The only Rust robotics shop I know of is Tangram Vision so you might try asking them? https://www.tangramvision.com/

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