Introduction to ROS Part 2: Getting Started with ROS 2 Services and Topics | Final

In this episode of our ROS 2 tutorial series, we dive into the powerful command-line tools that come with the Robot Operating System. Whether you're new to robotics or looking to deepen your ROS skills, this hands-on walkthrough will show you how to interact with nodes, topics, and services without writing a single line of code. The written guide for this episode can be found here: https://www.digikey.com/en/maker/tutorials/2025/intro-to-ros-part-2-getting-started-with-ros-2-using-the-command-line The GitHub repository containing the Docker image and example code for this series can be found here: https://github.com/ShawnHymel/introduction-to-ros We’ll start by launching a Docker-based ROS 2 environment using the Jazzy Jalisco distribution, ensuring a consistent development setup across operating systems. From there, we explore how to run built-in publisher and subscriber nodes, inspect topics with ros2 topic list, and use ros2 topic echo to monitor data being transmitted between nodes in real time. You’ll also learn how to interact with ROS services, including how to launch a service server, call it using the CLI, and inspect message types with ros2 interface show. We even demonstrate communication between Python and C++ nodes, showing the flexibility of ROS 2's messaging system. To help visualize your ROS system, we introduce rqt_graph, a graphical tool that displays node and topic connections in real time. This is essential for debugging and understanding how your system components communicate.

By the end of this video, you’ll be equipped to navigate and test ROS 2 applications from the terminal, laying the groundwork for writing your own custom nodes in future episodes. Subscribe to keep learning ROS 2, robotics development, and best practices for building scalable robot software! In the next episode, we will start writing some actual code, going beyond the built-in ROS 2 example nodes. We will dive into custom nodes that act as publishers and subscribers to topics.