Towards a distributed and real-time framework for robots: Evaluation of ROS 2.0 communications for real-time robotic applications

TL;DR

This paper evaluates ROS 2.0's suitability for real-time robotic applications by benchmarking communication latencies and proposing a setup to mitigate delays under certain conditions.

Contribution

It provides an experimental assessment of ROS 2.0 communications for real-time robotics and proposes a setup to reduce latency and missed deadlines.

Findings

ROS 2.0 can meet real-time requirements under specific conditions

Network congestion significantly impacts communication latency

A proposed setup helps mitigate delays and bounds traffic

Abstract

In this work we present an experimental setup to show the suitability of ROS 2.0 for real-time robotic applications. We disclose an evaluation of ROS 2.0 communications in a robotic inter-component (hardware) communication case on top of Linux. We benchmark and study the worst case latencies and missed deadlines to characterize ROS 2.0 communications for real-time applications. We demonstrate experimentally how computation and network congestion impacts the communication latencies and ultimately, propose a setup that, under certain conditions, mitigates these delays and obtains bounded traffic.