Intrinsic’s goal is to have a bzlmod version of Lyrical for the core elements available soon after the Lyrical release, likely within a month. Our primary developer on it is on leave until the end of the month at which time we’ll work to catch up for the final changes which landed in Lyrical, instead of diverting resources which could otherwise be focused on the main release. Testing of the early pre-releases showed didn’t have too many breakage last month.
This is still experimental work that Intrinsic is doing and sharing with the community. Though we’re also in contact with several other companies that we know of with interest in this area. And we are working on how to bring these together.
We still don’t have an official plan from the ROS PMC. I believe that there’s going to be a bunch of discussions around this area at ROSCon this fall which will probably be a good time to get people together who are interest in this space together and see what we can align on to meet everyone’s needs. I especially hope that by then we’ll have gotten in depth testing of the ROS Central Registry version of Lyrical to give us good signal about what track we should be following next to push towards an official support level.
Apex.AI has been working for several years with ROS 2 and Bazel. We open sourced our solution rules_ros ( GitHub - ApexAI/rules_ros: ROS 2 rules for Bazel · GitHub ) and use this internally to integrate open source ROS 2 with our overall Bazel infrastructure for our commercial product Apex.OS.
Our commercial product, Apex.OS, which is a production-ready and safety-certifiable (exciting news coming here in the coming months!) flavor of ROS 2 (Apex.Grace) with our own unique middleware implementation (Apex.Ida), leverages Bazel extensively, where rules_ros is just a small part of the extensive Bazel infrastructure we have built for a full production-ready solution, including tools and infrastructure for complete industry-standard process compliance such as IEC 61508, ISO 26262, APSICE, etc. in a developer-friendly environment (think everything in a git repo using an “X-as-code” approach), as well as already working with bzlmod. This infrastructure part we also offer commercially as Apex.Alan to customers who want to leverage Bazel for an end-to-end development solution for production projects, where lots of exciting Bazel rules, toolchains, etc. are available.
Happy to connect with anyone who is interested in a solution beyond the open source ROS 2 for commercial, production projects at scale.