Towards Distributed Real-Time capable Robotic Control using ROS2

Abstract

While controllers for modern robots often appear to users as monolithic black-boxes, approaches exist to write custom controllers and tune them with tools from community based frameworks. Using ROS2 as such a framework, single components and parameters can be exchanged and customized easily. Especially in research institutions but also in industrial environments this framework is used increasingly to fulfill the demanding requirements of robotic control. While ROS1 had no real-time capable method of communication, ROS2 promises to give this advantage. Matching the trend to use many distributed, specialized and small systems instead of one higly system-specific, inflexible system, this study assesses tuning of DDS parameters in order to improve communication speed.