Rustbag

A new rosbag player for ROS 2. It solves the problem that the original rosbag player struggles with high-bandwidth data and can't replay multiple rosbags reliably (#2158).

Advantages over the original player (rosbag2)

• Reliably plays multiple Rosbags without starvation issues.

• Improved reading algorithm: - Uses constant time rather than constant message count lookahead when reading, making it independent of frequency differences among topics (#2158).

• Robust and clean asynchronous code. The reader thread sends messages to the publisher thread via message passing, which eliminates starvation and deadlock bugs systematically (such as #2156). Rust's channels are a perfect fit here.

• Overall simpler implementation

It currently supports only the (default) mcap format: If you still have files in the legacy SQLite format, I recommend converting them first to MCAP using rosbags.

Installation

First, install Rust/Cargo: https://rust-lang.org/tools/install/

From cargo

cargo install rustbag
# add cargo bin folder to your path so that the rustbag command is found (add this line your ~/.bashrc)
export PATH=$PATH:~/.cargo/bin/

From source:

git clone https://github.com/iv461/rustbag
cd rustbag
cargo install --path .
# add cargo bin folder to your path so that the rustbag command is found (add this line your ~/.bashrc)
export PATH=$PATH:~/.cargo/bin/

You then need to source the ROS environment.

Usage

The CLI and the keyboard controls are almost the same as the original rosbag player. The only difference is that no -i flag is required for multiple rosbag files.

For example:

rustbag path/to/rosbag1 path/to/rosbag2 --clock --topics /sensing/lidar/pointcloud_raw /camera/center/image_rect/compressed --remap /tf:=/tf_old -l -r 0.5

Note: rustbag uses memory mapping for reading the files. This makes it appear to have an unreasonably high memory usage compared to rosbag2.

Features supported

• Agnostic to the RMW-implementation, i.e. supports CycloneDDS, FastDDs, Zenoh etc.
• Playing Multiple bags
• Playing compressed mcap files (.mcap.zstd)
• Controls: Pause, resume, changing rate, stepping to next message
• Choosing topics to include/exclude, also via regex
• Topic remapping
• Publishing clock (simulated time), filtering clock from bag
• Playing a rosbag in a loop, start offset
• Orders messages by their publish timestamp
• Reads the correct QoS from the bag file
• Choosing frequency of the /clock topic

Features currently not supported:

rosbag2 has quite an has an extensive feature set, PRs are welcome to add these missing features:

• Only supports the mcap format

• Replaying services

• Bag split

• Wait for all publishers to receive the ACK (r2r limitation)

• Disabling keyboard controls (Useful only if it was a composable node/module (https://github.com/ros2/rosbag2/pull/1607))

• QoS overrides (but /tf_static is always published with correct QoS)

• Controlling playback via services

• Delay before start (Just pause before play)

• Start paused (Just pause before play)

• Delay before each message (Just use rate)

• Choosing which topics trigger /clock (I see no use for this feature)

• Does not adapt serialization format: As all DDS-based RMWs as well as Zenoh use the same serialization format (CDR), , this is de facto not a problem

Contributing

Pull requests for bugfixes and for adding missing features that rosbag2 has are welcome. Please create an issue first to discuss your use-case before creating a pull request.

License

This software is released under the Apache-2 license.

Acknowledgement

The Rosbag2 project was a helpful reference for this project, particularly with regard to the keyboard controls and player clock. Rosbag2 is licensed under the Apache-2 licence.