ROS is a popular and widely used middleware, ecosystem, and environment for robotics development. It's become quite popular in research environments and for early prototyping, but it's not as common to see it in production environments. Why is that?

In this talk, I'll go over my experience productionising ROS in professional settings, what gaps ROS has, and how you all can avoid the pitfalls, issues, and hellholes I've dug myself into multiple times through my career. This will include ROS message serialisation and how to mesh it with other serialisation formats, how you can leverage Bazel to generate real ROS build artifacts with rules_ros2, and how to integrate all the above into a real robot in production with OTA updates.