Making a decision to go explore the less popular path of smarter software for imperfect robot hardware has a secondary effect: it also means I can switch to ROS 2 going forward. One of the downsides of going over to ROS 2 now is that I lose access to the vast library of open ROS nodes freely available online. But if I've decided I'm not going to use most of them anyway, there's less of a draw to stay in the ROS 1 ecosystem.

ROS 2 offers a lot of infrastructure upgrades that should be, on paper, very helpful for work going forward. First and foremost on my list is the fact I can now use Python 3 to write code for ROS 2. ROS 1 is coupled to Python 2, whose support stops in January 2020 and there's been a great deal of debate in ROS land on what to do about it. Open Robotics has declared their future work along this line is all Python 3 on ROS 2. So the community has been devising various ways to make Python 3 work on ROS 1. Switching to ROS 2 now let's me use Python 3 in a fully supported manner, no workarounds necessary.

And finally, investing in learning ROS 2 now has a much lower risk of having that time be thrown away by a future update. ROS 2 Dashing Diademata has just been released, and it is the first longer term service (LTS) release for ROS 2. I read this as a sign that Open Robotics is confident the period of major code churn for ROS 2 is coming to an end. No guarantees, naturally, especially if they learn of something that affects long term viability of ROS 2, but the odds have dropped significantly with evolution over the past few releases.

The only detraction for my personal exploration is the fact that ROS 2 has not yet released binaries for running on Raspberry Pi. I could build my own Raspberry Pi 3 version of ROS 2 from open source code, but I'm more likely to use the little Dell Inspiron 11 (3180) I had bought as candidate robot brain. It is already running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on an amd64 processor, making it a directly supported Tier 1 platform for ROS 2.