Bridging the Gap between ROS~2 and Classical Real-Time Scheduling for Periodic Tasks

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that minor modifications to ROS~2's events executor enable the application of classical real-time scheduling theory, significantly improving response times and latency in robotic systems.

Contribution

It shows that small changes to the ROS~2 events executor allow classical real-time analysis, bridging the gap between ROS~2 and traditional scheduling methods.

Findings

Improved worst-case response time and latency with the modified executor.

Reduced job drops compared to default ROS~2 executor.

Easy integration with existing ROS~2 systems.

Abstract

The Robot Operating System 2 (ROS~2) is a widely used middleware that provides software libraries and tools for developing robotic systems. In these systems, tasks are scheduled by ROS~2 executors. Since the scheduling behavior of the default ROS~2 executor is inherently different from classical real-time scheduling theory, dedicated analyses or alternative executors, requiring substantial changes to ROS~2, have been required. In 2023, the events executor, which features an events queue and allows the possibility to make scheduling decisions immediately after a job completes, was introduced into ROS~2. In this paper, we show that, with only minor modifications of the events executor, a large body of research results from classical real-time scheduling theory becomes applicable. Hence, this enables analytical bounds on the worst-case response time and the end-to-end latency, outperforming bounds for the default ROS 2 executor in many scenarios. Our solution is easy to integrate into existing ROS 2 systems since it requires only minor backend modifications of the events executor, which is natively included in ROS 2. The evaluation results show that our ROS~2 events executor with minor modifications can have significant improvement in terms of dropped jobs, worst-case response time, end-to-end latency, and performance compared to the default ROS~2 executor.