Achieving reliable communication between Kafka and ROS through bridge codes

Abstract

The number of smart warehouses has increased in the last few years, mainly because of the enormous sales volume in e-commerce systems. Such physical environments are fully equipped with robots that solve the orders that arrive there. Most research in the literature presents results just about the path planning and allocation tasks as the main problems related to this area. However, it is also essential to consider how robotic platforms, such as ROS (Robot Operating System), deal with integrating with streaming platforms that manage the orders that arrive into the smart warehouses. This paper presents a simple way to integrate ROS with Kafka, a streaming platform highly used in e-commerce systems. We develop a bridge code to glue these two platforms and test it within three realist simulation scenarios. As we will show, the use of the QoS profiles provided by the ROS Data Distribution Service (DDS) allows us to achieve a higher level of reliability.