Hi all, Isaac from Rerun here. We have been working on an experimental rosbag2 storage plugin.
Most ROS 2 data reaching us today arrives as an MCAP recorded with rosbag2. Now you can try using rosbag2 to record directly to RRD, Rerun’s native file format.
ros2 bag record -s rrd
This way, your recording is both a rosbag and a Rerun recording. You can stream to the viewer while you record, register to a Rerun server when you’re done, and query and train directly from the bagfile. You can even add more layers later, and the original remains a bagfile.
This sits alongside our existing MCAP support and log SDK as one more way to get robotics data into Rerun.
RRD stores data as indexed, columnar chunks of Apache Arrow record batches. A query reads only the columns and time ranges it needs, and Arrow gives direct paths into tools like DataFusion and out to formats like Parquet. The same columnar access feeds Rerun’s experimental PyTorch dataloader, so you can train a model straight from your registered bags with no export step. Michael Grupp and I will cover this in detail in our talk on the RRD data model at ROSCon in a few weeks, and we’d love to gather your feedback, perspective and questions as we prepare.
This is still experimental, but we are excited to make it available to test. Issues and PRs are welcome.