Introducing the Connext Robotics Toolkit for ROS 2

Rev up your ROS development with RTI

We're excited to introduce the new Connext Robotics Toolkit. Available today, it provides ROS 2 developers with much easier access to the RTI Connext platform’s full set of capabilities for fast development and trustworthy deployment – including tools, security and observability. Even better: it’s completely free for prototype development, research and non-commercial projects.

Helping developers innovate has always been RTI's passion. It's even in our full company name, Real-Time Innovations. To this end, RTI has supported ROS 2 since its inception more than 10 years ago. This includes by providing our core DDS^Ⓡ libraries free-of-charge with the Connext RMW for non-commercial use.

Now that ROS 2 has evolved beyond the lab, our goal remains helping development teams realize their designs faster while reducing project risk. To help advance the cause, the new Connext Robotics Toolkit delivers significant enhancements to our ROS solution.

• It expands the scope of our free license. You can now use it to develop pre-commercial prototypes, as well as for research and non-commercial projects. In addition, it includes all of our Connext Professional product, not only the underlying DDS libraries.
• It makes it much easier to use the full Connext product with ROS. A new Debian meta-package automatically installs compatible versions of ROS, Connext and Connext RMW with a single “apt install”.

   

The toolkit is available now for the ROS Kilted Kaiju release on Ubuntu Linux with the amd64 architecture. It will also be available with ROS Lyrical Luth when it is released on May 23, including arm64 support.

Ready to get started? Follow these installation instructions and register for your license key here. If you aren’t on Ubuntu amd64, you can separately install Connext Professional for use with ROS by registering here.

Why Connext Robotics Toolkit

The Connext Robotics Toolkit brings key benefits to your ROS development efforts:

Connext is the most mature and field-proven RMW solution. Its reliability makes your development go smoother while providing a trustworthy foundation for deploying mission-critical robotic and autonomous systems.

Connext tools augment standard ROS tools. This speeds development by making it much easier to monitor, optimize and debug network communication.

Connext provides fast and flexible prototype-to-production transition paths. This includes supporting incremental migration of critical applications from ROS to native Connext DDS interfaces for higher performance, better scalability, reduced resource consumption, and easier safety assurance.

Ready to start revving up ROS development? Check out the toolkit overview and our ROS resources. And we invite you to install the free version of the Connext Robotics Toolkit.

About the author:

David Barnett is Vice President of Market Intelligence at RTI. David has decades of experience in distributed, real-time and embedded systems. Since joining RTI in 2005, he has held numerous roles in market strategy, product management, and marketing. As the VP of Market Intelligence he is responsible for gathering and analyzing market insights to shape RTI’s business and product strategy. Prior to RTI, David was vice president of marketing at a real-time middleware startup that was acquired by Borland Software Corporation. He was also director of product marketing at Green Hills Software and Mentor Graphics, and a senior product marketing manager at Wind River Systems. 

David has a BA in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley.