eclipse-zenoh/zenoh-plugin-ros2dds

The zenoh-plugin-ros2dds occupies a critical niche in the robotics ecosystem. While ROS 2 traditionally relies on DDS for middleware, DDS often struggles with discovery overhead and performance in wireless or wide-area networks. Zenoh solves these issues, and this plugin provides the essential 'bridge' for existing ROS 2 stacks to leverage Zenoh without a total rewrite. With 254 stars and institutional backing from the Eclipse Foundation, it has established itself as the go-to solution for ROS 2-to-Zenoh interoperability. The defensibility stems from the deep technical domain expertise required to map the complex ROS 2/DDS computational graph onto Zenoh's primitives. Frontier labs (OpenAI, Google) are unlikely to compete here as they focus on high-level autonomy and LLM agents rather than low-level transport protocols. The primary 'risk' is actually internal evolution: the same team is developing a native 'rmw_zenoh' (Robot Middleware) which might eventually make the DDS-plugin approach less necessary for new projects, but the plugin remains vital for legacy integration and hybrid environments. The displacement horizon is 'unlikely' because Zenoh is currently the leading disruptor in the field, not the one being disrupted.