Your ROS 2 robot, live in Rerun.
Where we're going.
- Rewirethe project · where it's going
- Rerunhistory · the model · the gaps
- ROS 2 & Rerunfour attempts, and what they ran into
- The bridgewhat it does · how it holds up · a live demo
Rewire
the project · where it's going
A project, becoming a company.
Every team building machines that act in the physical world has one place to build, deploy and observe them.
Take the friction out of working with real robots — so the loop from running, to understanding, to shipping is simple and fast.
autonomous mobile robots · humanoids · drones · industrial automation · autonomous driving · embodied AI
One product, shipped: the bridge. Free today, and free forever.
Where that actually is today
Closed source for now. The business model isn't the bridge.
Every layer a robot needs. One shipped.
Rerun
history · the model · the gaps
Where it came from.
The shape of it.
nuScenes — lidar, cameras and radar from a drive. Grab it and move the camera.
Entities are folders. Components are files.
An entity-component system — with a time axis bolted through it.
3D · 2D · Time series · Text log · Map · Graph · Dataframe
Every view is a query over that tree — and the layout is data too, so two people can watch the same stream completely differently.
Scope decisions, not failures.
Rerun is a viewer and a log format. It has never claimed to be a middleware.
Everything on the right is a documented decision — which is exactly why the interesting work sits at the edge: getting live robot data in, without asking the robot for permission.
ROS 2 & Rerun
four attempts, and what they ran into
Four attempts.
“We are in the process right now of hiring someone who will own the ROS 2 integration full time. There will be a bridge but there were some technical maturity issues with the approach in this repo.”
Nikolaus West, Co-founder & CEO, Rerun
rerun-io/rerun-ros issue #14 · 1 April 2025
MCAP. Offline, and good.
16 modalities onto real archetypes. Everything else falls back to schema reflection — queryable, not drawn. ROS 1, never.
ends
Every row lands on the right of that line — and getting there needs rosbag2, which means ROS 2 on the robot.
What else you'd reach for.
Foxglove's viewer is ROS-free — its bridge isn't. That's the distinction worth being precise about.
And these aren't mutually exclusive: rviz for the control loop you're debugging, rewire for the recording you send to someone who has no ROS at all.
The bridge
what it does · how it holds up · a live demo
It listens. You see.
It never joins your graph. Rewire is a passive observer on the wire — norclcpp, no setup.bash, no ROS install, no load on your nodes.
rewire + rewire-viewerEverything, from one command.
Sensors, geometry, nav, TF and the URDF map to Rerun archetypes on their own.
74 built-in types
The same conventions Rerun uses for MCAP
Any custom message, mapped in JSON5. No code, no recompile.
Your own types
Scaffolded from your live graph
A recorded bag runs through the same mappings as the live bridge — at recorded pace, or as fast as the machine allows.
Bag playback
rewire play · MCAP in, viewer or .rrd out
74 types. Zero config.
Point it at a graph and sensors, geometry, nav, the TF tree and the URDF map to Rerun archetypes on their own — the same conventions Rerun uses for MCAP.
| ROS 2 type | Rerun archetype |
|---|---|
| sensor_msgs/Image | Image · DepthImage |
| sensor_msgs/CompressedImage | EncodedImage · VideoStream |
| sensor_msgs/PointCloud2 | Points3D |
| sensor_msgs/CameraInfo | Pinhole |
| nav_msgs/OccupancyGrid | GridMap |
| nav_msgs/Odometry | InstancePoses3D · Ellipsoids3D · Scalars |
| sensor_msgs/Temperature, +4 more | Measurements |
| tf2_msgs/TFMessage | Transform3D · CoordinateFrame |
| String on /robot_description | Asset3D |
Your types. No code.
Every proprietary message is just fields. Point each one at a Rerun archetype in a small JSON5 file — and it renders like a built-in.
/tf.The bridge watches itself.
Every metric is a Rerun entity — plotted on the same timeline as your robot's data, in the same recording.
A publisher outpaces the queue: Hz craters, drops jump. One scrub bar shows both.
Join late. See everything.
Speaks the wire. Both stacks.
No rmw, no middleware to match. Rewire reads the transport itself — and it reads both at the same time.
Humble · Jazzy · Kilted · Lyrical · Rolling
one binary
Live demo.
A racing drone, at 16 m/s.
Rewire finds every topic on its own and streams it into Rerun in real time.
What to watch
No config. No topic list.
Data: Computer Vision and Aerial Robotics group (CVAR), Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
Acknowledgements.
My attendance at this conference was supported by SHEREC — Safe, Healthy and Environmental Ship Recycling — funded by the European Union under Horizon Europe.
Grant agreement 101136056 · HORIZON-CL4-2023-HUMAN-01-CNECT
The Computer Vision and Aerial Robotics group (CVAR), Universidad Politécnica de Madrid — for the racing-drone flight in the demo, and for Aerostack2.
Rewire is independent: it is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Rerun Technologies AB. Rerun is a trademark of Rerun Technologies AB; ROS and ROS 2 are trademarks of Open Robotics.
Ready to see your robot?
One command to install. One command to visualize.
Newv0.14.0 · macOS & Linux
prefix.dev·APT·GitHub Releases
Questions or feedback? github.com/rewire-run/rewire/discussions