Swarm Robot Communications in ROS 2: An Experimental Study

In recent decades, robots have become increasingly popular and accessible. New frameworks have emerged to develop and communicate robotic applications, with ROS 2 or Robot Operating System 2 entitled as the preferred choice. Our work presents a testbed and defines a methodology to evaluate the valid...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIEEE access Vol. 12; pp. 142930 - 142943
Main Authors Castillo-Sanchez, Jose-Borja, Gonzalez-Parada, Eva, Cano-Garcia, Jose-Manuel
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Piscataway IEEE 2024
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subjects
DDS
embedded systems
Middleware
network analysis
Protocols
Robot kinematics
Robot sensing systems
Robotics
Robots
ROS 2
Service robots
Surgery
Swarm robotics
Swarm robots
Wireless communication
Wireless communications
Wireless fidelity
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Summary:In recent decades, robots have become increasingly popular and accessible. New frameworks have emerged to develop and communicate robotic applications, with ROS 2 or Robot Operating System 2 entitled as the preferred choice. Our work presents a testbed and defines a methodology to evaluate the validity of ROS 2 middleware for enabling dependable wireless robot swarm communications. Wireless robot swarms are constrained by a number of factors, including their limited computational power and the fact that they communicate over wireless mediums. Wireless media are typically more susceptible to errors, exhibit higher latencies, or may be subject to outage zones. Consequently, this paper proposes an experimental approach using genuine robot-grade hardware and employing standard communication mechanisms, with the objective of achieving an optimal balance between messaging reliability and delay. A series of test cases were defined, each with distinct settings, including distance, bit coding, diffusion mechanism, and so forth. The results can be readily replicated with the publicly available code and scripts for tests and analysis. Our findings indicate a significant lack of optimisation with respect to ROS 2 wireless communications in swarm scenarios. To address this, we propose a series of recommendations for improving the efficiency of these communications.
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ISSN:2169-3536
2169-3536
DOI:10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3470254