Overview
Active contributor to the MRPT (Mobile Robot Programming Toolkit) ROS ecosystem, supporting both ROS1 and ROS2. The MRPT library is widely used in academia and industry for autonomous navigation and SLAM. This contribution expands ROS2 adoption and brings MRPT's powerful navigation stack to the growing ROS2 ecosystem.
The Challenge
The robotics community is actively migrating from ROS1 to ROS2, but many established libraries lag behind this transition. MRPT's ROS1 packages include mature, production-tested autonomous navigation components that the ROS2 community needs. The migration requires deep understanding of both ROS1 and ROS2 APIs, careful handling of breaking changes, and maintaining behavior parity while adopting ROS2 patterns.
Technical Approach
- Led porting of autonomous navigation components from ROS1 to ROS2
- Ported localization pipelines (Monte Carlo localization, AMCL variants) to ROS2
- Migrated navigation stack components including obstacle avoidance and motion planning
- Currently working on porting SLAM modules to ROS2
- Collaborated directly with the MRPT library creator (University of Almería, Spain)
- Maintained backward compatibility and API documentation throughout
- Increased active user base of the library through ROS2 availability
Key Outcomes
ROS1→ROS2
Full Port
Navigation + SLAM
Components Ported
Active
Ongoing Contributions
↑ User Base
ROS2 Adoption
Note: The MRPT library was also used in Teladoc's commercial AMR navigation stack (my day job), making this open source work directly applicable and validated in production robotics systems.