Software & Middleware

ROS Bag

A ROS bag is a recording of timestamped ROS messages captured from live topics, replayable later to reproduce a robot's exact sensor and state streams for debugging, algorithm development, and dataset creation. The rosbag2 implementation in ROS 2 supports pluggable storage backends, with the MCAP container format now the default. Bags are the raw material from which many robot learning datasets are curated and converted.

Why it matters for physical AI

Log-and-replay is the foundation of robotics debugging and data engineering, and bag archives from deployed fleets are increasingly mined as training corpora for learned perception and control.