ROS 0.7 Released

ROS 0.7 has been released. The 0.7.x series introduces many new features and bug fixes. The two biggest changes are "Publisher latching" as well as the deprecation of the old roscpp "Node" API.

Publisher latching: Publisher latching lets you automatically send the last message published to new subscribers. This has many uses cases. For example, instead of writing a map Service, you could have a map Topic. A Topic is preferable as you can then record the map data using rosrecord. Another use for publisher latching is to reduce the publication rate for data that is slowly changing, as you can now more easily ensure that new subscribers will receive the latest data automatically. Previously this was possible using subscriber callbacks, but this streamlines implementations. By default, rostopic pub now latches, so you can use it to quickly 'latch' a value into the ROS Computation Graph.

Node API deprecated: roscpp's Node API is now deprecated in favor of the NodeHandle API. Some of the NodeHandle methods have been deprecated as well. Please update your code as the Node API will be removed in future releases. Please see the notes below for specific details on NodeHandle methods that have been deprecated.

For a more detailed list of changes, please see the changelist.

To download this release, please visit the download page.

We've also put together a new tutorial to introduce the ROS concepts and associated command-line tools. This is still a work-in-progress, but feel free to check it out.