Announcing ROS 2 IDL Support in Foxglove

Integration for the OMG Interface Definition and Language spec

Sam Nosenzo ·

Esther Weon ·

2 min read

Published March 23, 2023

Announcing ROS 2 IDL Support in Foxglove

Foxglove now supports ROS 2 data with IDL-defined message schemas. You can now use .msg or .idl definitions to load ROS 2 data into Foxglove, without any other changes to your workflows.

While ROS 2 users typically define message types using the .msg schema encoding, ROS 2 also supports a subset of the OMG IDL spec for compatibility across ROS and non-ROS components. If you’ve been using rosbag2 to record data, you can use this same package to write both .msg and .idl schemas to MCAP files.

When you load MCAP files in Foxglove for visualization and analysis, ROS 2 will parse their contained ros2msg and ros2idl schemas to deserialize messages on demand.

You can also connect live to your ROS 2 stack with the Foxglove WebSocket connection, which now supports IDL schema messages. First install the foxglove_bridge package to get connected:

Foxglove WebSocket connection

For more details, you can check out the rosbag2_storage_mcap package for writing ROS 2 data to MCAP files, as well as the foxglove/rosmsg package for parsing ROS .msg and .idl message definitions. You can also reference the MCAP docs for reading and writing MCAP files with our helper libraries (available in Python, C++, and more).

If you have any questions or feedback, reach out directly to the Foxglove team in our Discord community for support.