Introduction

Talos is a terminal-native tool for observing and interacting with ROS 2 systems.

The main idea is to separate the developer workstation from the ROS 2 runtime. The robot runs talos-agent, which talks to ROS 2 through rclrs. Developer machines run talos-tui or talos-cli, which connect to the agent over Unix domain sockets for local use or QUIC for remote use.

flowchart LR
    subgraph Workstation["Developer machine"]
        TUI["talos-tui"]
        CLI["talos-cli"]
        NoROS["No ROS 2 runtime needed"]
    end

    subgraph Target["Target device"]
        Agent["talos-agent"]
        Rclrs["rclrs"]
        ROS["ROS 2 graph"]
    end

    TUI -->|"UDS or QUIC"| Agent
    CLI -->|"UDS or QUIC"| Agent
    Agent --> Rclrs
    Rclrs --> ROS

Only the agent depends on ROS 2. The shared protocol, CLI, and TUI build and run without a ROS 2 installation.

What Talos Provides

• Topic observation with live message data rendered as generic trees.
• ROS 2 node discovery and graph inspection.
• A filterable /rosout log view.
• URDF-aware joint state display and joint command publishing.
• A small CLI for scripts and one-shot checks.

Current Scope

Talos currently focuses on observation, basic joint control, and terminal workflows. It does not try to replace RViz, provide full ROS 2 service/action proxying, or expose arbitrary dynamic message support beyond the compiled-in message conversions in the agent.

Documentation Status

This book is the canonical project documentation. Keep it aligned with current behavior and use the design history pages for context on important choices.