Abstract
The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a popular and widely used software framework for building robotics systems. With the growth of its popularity, it has started to be used in multi-robot systems as well. However, the TCP connections that the platform relies on for connecting the so-called ROS nodes presents several issues regarding limited-bandwidth, delays, and jitter, when used in wireless multi-hop networks. In this paper, we present a thorough analysis of the problem and propose a new ROS node called Pound to improve the wireless communication performance by reducing delay and jitter in data exchanges, especially in multi-hop networks. Pound allows the use of multiple ROS masters (roscores), features data compression, and importantly, introduces a priority scheme that allows favoring more important flows over less important ones. We compare Pound to the state-of-the-art solutions through extensive experiments and show that it performs equally well, or better in all the test cases, including a control-over-network example.
Links
BibTeX (Download)
@article{Tardioli2018,
title = {Pound: A multi-master ROS node for reducing delay and jitter in wireless multi-robot networks},
author = {Danilo Tardioli and Ramviyas Parasuraman and Petter Ögren. },
url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921889017309144},
doi = {10.1016/j.robot.2018.10.009},
year = {2019},
date = {2019-01-01},
journal = {Robotics and Autonomous Systems},
volume = {111},
pages = {73-87},
abstract = {The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a popular and widely used software framework for building robotics systems. With the growth of its popularity, it has started to be used in multi-robot systems as well. However, the TCP connections that the platform relies on for connecting the so-called ROS nodes presents several issues regarding limited-bandwidth, delays, and jitter, when used in wireless multi-hop networks. In this paper, we present a thorough analysis of the problem and propose a new ROS node called Pound to improve the wireless communication performance by reducing delay and jitter in data exchanges, especially in multi-hop networks. Pound allows the use of multiple ROS masters (roscores), features data compression, and importantly, introduces a priority scheme that allows favoring more important flows over less important ones. We compare Pound to the state-of-the-art solutions through extensive experiments and show that it performs equally well, or better in all the test cases, including a control-over-network example.},
keywords = {multi-robot, networking, robotics},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {article}
}