[ros-users] ROS & DDS

[Brian Gerkey]

hi,

As we work on improving the communications middleware within ROS, one
of the approaches that has come up repeatedly is DDS (Data
Distribution Service; http://portals.omg.org/dds/).  There are lots of
positive aspects of DDS as a middleware, and of course some tradeoffs
(e.g., in exchange for lots of features in the message transport, the
API is incredibly verbose; while there are open source
implementations, there's not the feeling of an active community doing
development on them).

We'd like to understand what the level of interest is within the ROS
community for DDS support.

So, for those of you who already know something about DDS (especially
if you have experience using it), here are some questions to start a
discussion.  Don't feel obliged to answer every question, and also
feel free to answer questions not asked here.  If you prefer, you can
reply directly to me, and we'll anonymize your comments before
potentially sharing them.

What's your opinion of DDS (good, bad, ugly, other)?  If you like DDS,
why?  If you don't like it, why not?

How would you compare DDS to the ROS middleware?

Do you see others in your field using DDS?  Have you ever wished that
ROS could "speak DDS"?  Have you already used DDS in combination with
ROS?

thanks,
brian.