FogROS G: Enabling Secure, Connected and Mobile Fog Robotics with Global Addressability

TL;DR

FogROS G enhances fog robotics by providing a secure, mobile-friendly, and globally addressable communication infrastructure that supports seamless connectivity across different networks and ROS versions.

Contribution

It introduces FogROS G, a novel secure routing framework with global addressability and cross-ROS compatibility for mobile fog robotics applications.

Findings

Enables global, secure, and persistent robot addressing.

Supports seamless communication across ROS1, ROS2, and DDS.

Ensures only authenticated parties can communicate with robots.

Abstract

Fog Robotics renders networked robots with greater mobility, on-demand compute capabilities and better energy efficiency by offloading heavy robotics workloads to nearby Edge and distant Cloud data centers. However, as the de-facto standard for implementing fog robotics applications, Robot Operating System (ROS) and its successor ROS2 fail to provide fog robots with a mobile-friendly and secure communication infrastructure. In this work, we present FogROS G, a secure routing framework that connects robotics software components from different physical locations, networks, Data Distribution Service (DDS) and ROS distributions. FogROS G indexes networked robots with globally unique 256-bit names that remains constant even if the robot roams between multiple administrative network domains. FogROS G leverages Global Data Plane, a global and secure peer-to-peer routing infrastructure between the names, guaranteeing that only authenticated party can send to or receive from the robot. FogROS G adopts a proxy-based design that connect nodes from ROS1 and ROS2 with mainstream DDS vendors; this can be done without any changes to the application code.