Robot Operating System 2

The ground-up rewrite of ROS that defaults to DDS for its underlying communication; the standard choice for new projects.

ROS 2 is a redesign of ROS 1, led by Open Robotics. Its biggest change is switching the default communication layer to DDS (Data Distribution Service), an industrial middleware standard, which removes the need for a central master node (roscore) and lets nodes discover each other automatically; it also adds Quality of Service (QoS) settings and better real-time and security support. Ubuntu and Windows are officially first-tier supported; macOS has to be built from source. It keeps the same core concepts — nodes, topics, services, actions — but its interfaces and build tools (colcon, ament) differ from ROS 1, so code isn't directly portable between them. The long-term support (LTS) releases still maintained are Humble, Jazzy, and Lyrical, released in May 2026 and supported through 2031. Nav2 navigation, MoveIt 2, ros2_control, and many humanoid and quadruped robot SDKs have all migrated to ROS 2.

ExampleAfter installing ROS 2 on Ubuntu, running ros2 topic list lists every topic currently active in the system.

Also called

ROS 2, ROS2

Related

Robot Operating System · Data Distribution Service · ROS 2 Quality of Service (QoS) · Node (ROS) · Topic (ROS) · colcon

Sources

ROS 2 Documentation
ROS 2 Distributions（各发行版发布与停更时间） (Chinese)
Lyrical Luth Supported Platforms（平台支持等级与默认中间件） (Chinese)

As of

2026-09