Talos

Talos is a terminal-native tool for observing and interacting with ROS 2 systems. The agent runs beside ROS 2 on the robot; the CLI and TUI can run on a developer machine without a ROS 2 installation.

What It Does

• Observes ROS 2 topics and renders live message data as generic trees.
• Lists ROS 2 nodes with graph details.
• Displays /rosout logs in the terminal UI.
• Shows URDF-aware joint state and can send configured joint commands.
• Connects locally over Unix domain sockets or remotely over feature-gated QUIC.

Documentation

The canonical documentation lives in the mdBook under docs/.

mdbook serve docs

Quick Checks

Build the shared library and workstation clients without ROS 2:

cargo check -p talos-common -p talos-cli -p talos-tui

Build the full workspace after sourcing the ROS 2/rclrs environment:

source rclrs_ws/install/setup.bash
cargo check --workspace

Enable QUIC support with:

cargo build --features quic

Crates

• talos-common: protocol, config, session, transport, and URDF support.
• talos-agent: ROS 2 bridge and client server.
• talos-cli: scriptable command-line client.
• talos-tui: interactive terminal UI.

Status

Talos is early-stage software. See the docs for current behavior, design history, and future plans.