Enabling the Deployment of Any-Scale Robotic Applications in Microservice Architectures through Automated Containerization

TL;DR

This paper introduces an open-source tooling suite that automates containerization and deployment of robotic applications using microservice architectures, aiming to improve development speed, resilience, and scalability.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel automated containerization toolkit for ROS-based robotic applications, facilitating microservice deployment and streamlining DevOps processes.

Findings

Automated minimal containerization of ROS applications achieved

Collection of ML-enabled base container images provided

Tools demonstrated to improve deployment efficiency and scalability

Abstract

In an increasingly automated world -- from warehouse robots to self-driving cars -- streamlining the development and deployment process and operations of robotic applications becomes ever more important. Automated DevOps processes and microservice architectures have already proven successful in other domains such as large-scale customer-oriented web services (e.g., Netflix). We recommend to employ similar microservice architectures for the deployment of small- to large-scale robotic applications in order to accelerate development cycles, loosen functional dependence, and improve resiliency and elasticity. In order to facilitate involved DevOps processes, we present and release a tooling suite for automating the development of microservices for robotic applications based on the Robot Operating System (ROS). Our tooling suite covers the automated minimal containerization of ROS applications, a collection of useful machine learning-enabled base container images, as well as a CLI tool for simplified interaction with container images during the development phase. Within the scope of this paper, we embed our tooling suite into the overall context of streamlined robotics deployment and compare it to alternative solutions. We release our tools as open-source software at https://github.com/ika-rwth-aachen/dorotos.