ROS 2 in a Nutshell: A Survey

Abstract

This survey offers the most comprehensive and systematic review to date of Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2), addressing the lack of a cohesive synthesis of its technical advances, challenges, and ecosystem evolution relative to ROS 1. Our analysis is guided by three research questions: (RQ1) How does ROS 2 improve upon ROS 1, and what new limitations arise? (RQ2) What advances address redesign challenges and enable deployment? (RQ3) Which frameworks and tools shape its ecosystem and reveal gaps? To answer RQ1, we discuss the motivations for ROS 2, its advantages over ROS 1, and remaining limitations. For RQ2, we distill the ROS literature to identify work focused on ROS 2 and organize it into four pillars: (a) middleware architecture, (b) real-time scheduling and hardware acceleration, (c) security and safety, and (d) multi-robot and distributed systems, showing how the literature mitigates limitations and enables deployments across domains such as autonomous vehicles, healthcare, agriculture, aerospace, logistics, and public safety. Finally, for RQ3, we survey the ROS 2 ecosystem, covering frameworks, simulators, and more than 150 open-source packages, and we highlight gaps in deployed tools. This is complemented by an open-access database unifying ROS 1 and ROS 2 literature at https://asmbatati.github.io/ros2_survey/.