Message Passing Optimization in Robot Operating System

• DOI: 10.1007/s10766-019-00647-w
• Publication Date: 2019-11-16T16:01:43Z
• Authors: Ziyue Jiang; Yifan Gong; Jidong Zhai; Yu-Ping Wang; Wei Liu; Hao Wu; Jiangming Jin
• Keywords: Serialization; Python

With the development of deep learning, autonomous robot systems grow rapidly and require better performance. Robot Operating System 2 (ROS2) has been widely adopted as the main communication framework in autonomous robot systems. However, the performance of ROS2 has become the bottleneck of these real-time systems. From our observations, we find that it can take a large amount of time to serialize complex message in communication, especially for some high-level programming languages, including Python, Java and so on. To address this challenge, we propose a novel technique, called adaptive two-layer serialization algorithm, which can achieve good performance in communication for different kinds of messages. Experimental results show that our algorithm can achieve significant performance improvement over traditional methods in ROS2, up to 93% improvement in our framework. We have successfully applied our proposed techniques in a real autonomous robot system.