natnet

natnet is a Rust implementation of NatNet, the protocol that OptiTrack’s Motive software uses to stream motion capture. natnet_zenoh publishes that stream on the Zenoh network, where ROS 2 nodes running on rmw_zenoh receive it as ordinary topics.

Features

  • Protocol: server info, model definitions and frames of NatNet 3.0 to 4.1, with marker sets, rigid bodies, skeletons, assets, force plates and devices.
  • Client: unicast or multicast UDP, commands to Motive, and optional Serde and nalgebra support.
  • Bridge: rigid-body poses, odometry and transforms, skeletons, markers, force plates and diagnostics as ROS 2 topics or native Zenoh keys; the bridge itself needs no ROS 2 installation.
  • Command line: natnet_zenoh probe reports what Motive streams, record captures it to a file, serve replays a capture or a synthetic scene without Motive, and run starts the bridge from a TOML configuration.

Status

The latest releases are natnet 0.1.0 and natnet_zenoh 0.1.0 (October 2026) on crates.io, dual-licensed under MIT or Apache 2.0; natnet_zenoh also ships binaries for Linux, macOS and Windows.