Hello! Student at Rensselaer Polytechnic here! We’ve had 2 Stretch RE1’s for a bit now, and finally dedicating one fully to give Lab Tours and delivering documents, small packages, etc.
I’m just starting, but have a pretty good understanding of ROS2 since that’s taught here, but have no knowledge of ROS1.
My question is: Should I stick with ROS1, or use ROS2?
Since I have a solid base with ROS2, I’d prefer to use that, but have seen a lot of warnings that it’s unstable right now… It looks like all the parts I need already exist within v0.3 (though experimental), so should I just stick with what I know?
Just asking because I’d rather not start and then learn down the road that a major capability doesn’t work on ROS2 and have to switch back…
Hi @byrnete, good question! ROS 2 Humble, the v0.3 docs, and Python 3.10 on Stretch are all being released on March 4th, 2024. That’s why you’ve seen the “experimental” tag on them; the code is public and open-source, but in “beta” until their release on March 4th.
As for which version to choose, I’d recommend going with ROS 2 as it should have near equal parity in terms of software capabilities as ROS 1. However, please note the exception that a ROS 2 simulator for Stretch isn’t being released on March 4th. The ROS 2 capabilities will exceed that of ROS 1 with support for Navigation2 and MoveIt2. Lastly, ROS 1 support is going into “maintenance mode” (i.e. it’ll receive bugfixes, but not new feature development) on March 4th, and it will reach end-of-life next year.
Hope this information is helpful. Let me know if you have any questions.
Hi @Roderick_Taylor, currently we do not have a timeline for supporting the new Gazebo Harmonic. Would you mind telling me a bit about your use-case and if the existing options (e.g. Stretch’s Mujoco simulation) do/don’t work for you.
We just wanted to use ROS2 and have invested time into New Gazebo (previously ignition) for other robotic platforms we use. We have an initial port to ROS2 (Jazzy) and New Gazebo (Harmonic) that we are testing and comparing to the real ones we just received. If there is enough interest, I’ll go through our company’s process to get it published on github.