Mapping and Optimizing Communication in ROS 2-based Applications on Configurable System-on-Chip Platforms

TL;DR

This paper introduces gateways in ROS 2-based systems on configurable SoC platforms to optimize communication, reducing data transfers between hardware and software, and demonstrating significant speedups in multi-subscriber scenarios.

Contribution

It presents a novel gateway approach that bridges hardware and software communication in ROS 2, improving efficiency and performance in heterogeneous systems.

Findings

Significant speedups in multi-subscriber scenarios with large messages.

A methodology for communication mapping of ROS 2 computation graphs.

Autonomous driving example achieves 1.4x speedup with gateways.

Abstract

The robot operating system is the de-facto standard for designing and implementing robotics applications. Several previous works deal with the integration of heterogeneous accelerators into ROS-based applications. One of these approaches is ReconROS, which enables nodes to be completely mapped to hardware. The follow-up work fpgaDDS extends ReconROS by an intra-FPGA data distribution service to process topic-based communication between nodes entirely in hardware. However, the application of this approach is strictly limited to communication between nodes implemented in hardware only. This paper introduces gateways to close the gap between topic communication in hardware and software. Gateways aim to reduce data transfers between hardware and software by synchronizing a hardware-and software-mapped topic. As a result, data must be transferred only once compared to a separate data transmission for each subscribing hardware node in the baseline. Our measurements show significant speedups in multi-subscriber scenarios with large message sizes. From the conclusions of these measurements, we present a methodology for the communication mapping of ROS 2 computation graphs. In the evaluation, an autonomous driving real-world example benefits from the gateway and achieves a speedup of 1.4.