Migration Guides: Jazzy to Kilted

This list summarizes important changes between Jazzy (previous) and Kilted (current) releases, where changes to user code might be necessary.

controller_interface

get_ordered_interfaces now throws if the size of the output vector does not match the size of the input names vector (#2528).

controller_interface::init() has been deprecated, use the init(const controller_interface::ControllerInterfaceParams & params) method instead. (#2390). For example, the following code:

controller_interface::ControllerInterfaceParams params;
params.controller_name = "controller_name";
params.robot_description = "";
params.update_rate = 50;
params.node_namespace = "";
params.node_options = controller.define_custom_node_options();
controller.init(params);

controller_manager

The spawner now supports two new arguments --switch-asap and --no-switch-asap to control the behaviour of the spawner when switching controllers to be in realtime loop (or) non-realtime loop. By default, it is set to --no-switch-asap because when activating multiple controllers at same time might affect the realtime loop performance (#2452). If it is needed to switch controllers in realtime loop, then the argument --switch-asap need to be parsed to the spawner.

hardware_interface

The preferred signature for the on_init method in all hardware_interface::*Interface classes has changed (# 2323) from
```
CallbackReturn on_init(const hardware_interface::HardwareInfo& info)
```
to
```
CallbackReturn on_init(const HardwareComponentInterfaceParams& params)
```
The HardwareInfo object can be accessed from the HardwareComponentInterfaceParams object using params.hardware_info. Hardware implementations implementing the on_init method should update their method signature accordingly as the deprecated signature will be removed in a future release.

See Writing a Hardware Component for advanced usage of the HardwareComponentInterfaceParams object.

The preferred signature for the init() method in all hardware_interface::*Interface classes has changed (# 2344) from

CallbackReturn init(const HardwareInfo & hardware_info, rclcpp::Logger logger, rclcpp::Clock::SharedPtr clock)

to

CallbackReturn init(const hardware_interface::HardwareComponentParams & params)

The initialize methods of all hardware components (such as Actuator, Sensor, etc.) have been updated from passing a const HardwareInfo & to passing a const HardwareComponentParams & (# 2323). The old signatures are deprecated and will be removed in a future release.
The thread_priority variable in the HardwareInfo struct has been deprecated in favor of newly introduced async_params variable that has more options in the HardwareComponentParams struct. The deprecated thread_priority variable will be removed in a future release. (# 2477).