From ROS to Rust: Hiroz, Zenoh, and a Robotics Stack You Can `cargo build`
- Time
- 2026-08-08 14:10 ~ 14:40
- Speaker
- Yuyuan Yuan
- Room
- RB105
- Co-write
Abstract
Eclipse Zenoh unifies data in motion, data at rest, and computations with a single protocol—from microcontrollers to cloud infrastructure. This open-source Rust stack delivers pub/sub, geo-distributed queries, and storage with low-latency performance.
Hiroz is a pure-Rust ROS 2 middleware built natively on Zenoh—no C dependencies, just cargo build. Wire-compatible with standard ROS 2 nodes via rmw_zenoh, it provides Rust/Go/Python bindings with zero-copy support and Protobuf serialization. Fully open-source Apache-2.0: github.com/ZettaScaleLabs/hiroz. Check out the website!
This talk covers why the two existing Rust-in-ROS-2 approaches each involve real trade-offs—ros2_rust wraps the C RCL layer and stays wire-compatible but requires a full ROS 2 install and spreads unsafe FFI throughout; dora-rs goes pure Rust but drops wire compatibility entirely—and how hiroz takes a third path: pure Rust, no C dependencies, and wire-compatible with standard ROS 2 nodes out of the box. We then go inside hiroz's async runtime design, message generation pipeline, and multi-language binding strategies.
Speaker
Yuyuan Yuan
Yuyuan Yuan is a Solution Architect at ZettaScale Technology, where he works on Zenoh — an open-source Rust protocol for pub/sub, queries, and distributed storage from edge to cloud.
He works on Hiroz, a pure-Rust Zenoh-native ROS 2 middleware, and holds commit access to both Eclipse Zenoh and ros2/rmw_zenoh — the official Zenoh-based RMW for ROS 2. His work spans protocol design, async runtime architecture, and multi-language bindings from a Rust core (Python via PyO3, Go via C FFI).
He has presented at FOSDEM 2026 (Robotics and Simulation devroom), GOSIM, RUSTAsia 2025, and COSCUP 2023 and 2022. When not writing Rust, he explores formal proofs in Lean, runs marathons, and has completed a 226 km Ironman-distance triathlon. He runs NixOS btw.