Disclosed in the present application are a method and device for managing a shared memory in a robot operating system. A detailed embodiment of the method comprises: acquiring a shared memory registering service request transmitted from a message receiving node, the shared memory registering service request comprising a topic name and a size of a required memory segment; requesting a memory segment in a shared memory area based on the size of the required memory segment, associating the topic name with the requested memory segment, and saving the topic name in a configuration file; dividing the requested memory segment into a plurality of memory blocks based on a size of a message transmitted from a message transmitting node; and deallocating the requested memory segment where any one of following conditions is satisfied: the topic name in a main node is inconsistent with that in the configuration file, the message transmitting node and message receiving node stop working, and the message receiving node stops subscribing to a topic corresponding to the topic name. By means of the embodiment, the shared memory of the robot operating system is allocated and managed more reasonably and flexibly.