# ROS 2 for RoboCup

## TL;DR

This paper explores the adoption of ROS 2 in RoboCup, demonstrating its advantages for real-time, embedded, and multi-robot systems through developed modules, contributions, and benchmark results.

## Contribution

The paper introduces ROS 2 packages tailored for humanoid robots in RoboCup and reports on contributions to ROS 2 core and RoboCup packages.

## Key findings

- ROS 2 supports real-time processing and embedded systems.
- Single-process node composition reduces communication overhead.
- Benchmarks indicate ROS 2's suitability as a common framework.

## Abstract

There has always been much motivation for sharing code and solutions among teams in the RoboCup community. Yet the transfer of code between teams was usually complicated due to a huge variety of used frameworks and their differences in processing sensory information. The RoboCup@Home league has tackled this by transitioning to ROS as a common framework. In contrast, other leagues, such as those using humanoid robots, are reluctant to use ROS, as in those leagues real-time processing and low-computational complexity is crucial. However, ROS 2 now offers built-in support for real-time processing and promises to be suitable for embedded systems and multi-robot systems. It also offers the possibility to compose a set of nodes needed to run a robot into a single process. This, as we will show, reduces communication overhead and allows to have one single binary, which is pertinent to competitions such as the 3D-Simulation League. Although ROS 2 has not yet been announced to be production ready, we started the process to develop ROS 2 packages for using it with humanoid robots (real and simulated). This paper presents the developed modules, our contributions to ROS 2 core and RoboCup related packages, and most importantly it provides benchmarks that indicate that ROS 2 is a promising candidate for a common framework used among leagues.