Proxying ROS communications -- enabling containerized ROS deployments in distributed multi-host environments

TL;DR

This paper introduces a layer 7 transparent proxy server architecture to facilitate containerized ROS deployments across multiple hosts, addressing communication challenges and enabling ROS use in distributed, multi-host environments.

Contribution

It presents a novel proxy solution that allows seamless ROS communication in containerized, multi-host setups, improving deployment flexibility and network compatibility.

Findings

Proposed a layer 7 proxy architecture for ROS

Analyzed ROS communication protocols and container networking modes

Demonstrated improved multi-host ROS deployment capabilities

Abstract

With the ability to use containers at the edge, they pose a unified solution to combat the complexity of distributed multi-host ROS deployments, as well as individual ROS-node and dependency deployment. The bidirectional communication in ROS poses a challenge to using containerized ROS deployments alongside non-containerized ones spread over multiple machines though. We will analyze the communication protocol employed by ROS, and the suitability of different container networking modes and their implications on ROS deployments. Finally, we will present a layer 7 transparent proxy server architecture for ROS, as a solution to the identified problems. Enabling the use of ROS not only in containerized environments, but proxying ROS between network segments in general.