Pound: A ROS node for Reducing Delay and Jitter in Wireless Multi-Robot Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces Pound, a ROS node designed to reduce delay and jitter in wireless multi-robot networks by prioritizing important data flows, thereby enhancing communication reliability and performance.

Contribution

The paper presents Pound, a novel ROS node that improves wireless communication in multi-robot systems by supporting multiple cores and prioritizing data flows to reduce delay and jitter.

Findings

Pound outperforms existing solutions in reducing delay and jitter.

Pound maintains high performance in multi-hop wireless networks.

Effective in control-over-network applications.

Abstract

The Robot Operating System (ROS) is rapidly becoming the de facto framework for building robotics systems, thanks to its flexibility and the large acceptance that it has received in the robotics community. With the growth of its popularity, it has started to be used in multi-robot systems as well. However, the TCP connections that the platform relies on for connecting the so-called ROS nodes, presents several issues in terms of limited-bandwidth, delays and jitter, when used in wireless ad-hoc networks. In this paper, we present a thorough analysis of the problem and propose a new ROS node called Pound to improve the wireless communication performance. Pound allows the use of multiple ROS cores and introduces a priority scheme favoring more important flows over less important ones, thus reducing delay and jitter over single-hop and multihop networks. We compare Pound to the state-of-the-art solutions and show that it performs equally well, or better in all the test cases, including a control-over-network example.