If you would prefer not having to install R (rpy2 requires it), there is a new package “pyreadr” to read Rds and RData files very easily.
It is a wrapper around the C library librdata, so it is very fast.
You can install it easily with pip:
pip install pyreadr
Then you can read your rds file:
import pyreadr
result = pyreadr.read_r('/path/to/file.Rds') # also works for RData
# done!
# result is a dictionary where keys are the name of objects and the values python
# objects. In the case of Rds there is only one object with None as key
df = result[None] # extract the pandas data frame
The repo is here: https://github.com/ofajardo/pyreadr
Disclaimer: I am the developer of this package.