Robot Operating System 2: Design, architecture, and uses in the wild

Abstract

The next chapter of the robotics revolution is well underway with the deployment of robots for a broad range of commercial use cases. Even in a myriad of applications and environments, there exists a common vocabulary of components that robots share—the need for a modular, scalable, and reliable architecture; sensing; planning; mobility; and autonomy. The Robot Operating System (ROS) was an integral part of the last chapter, demonstrably expediting robotics research with freely available components and a modular framework. However, ROS 1 was not designed with many necessary production-grade features and algorithms. ROS 2 and its related projects have been redesigned from the ground up to meet the challenges set forth by modern robotic systems in new and exploratory domains at all scales. In this Review, we highlight the philosophical and architectural changes of ROS 2 powering this new chapter in the robotics revolution. We also show through case studies the influence ROS 2 and its adoption has had on accelerating real robot systems to reliable deployment in an assortment of challenging environments.

A Multi-Sensory Guidance System for the Visually Impaired Using YOLO and ORB-SLAM

“…At the hardware level, the system consists of an Intel RealSense RGB-D camera [34], a Raspberry Pi embedded board, a battery, and a vibration motor array. We use the robot operating system (ROS) [35] to integrate each functional module and manage the data transmission at the same time. The system consists of eleven ROS nodes at the software level, and they communicate mainly through the Publish-Subscribe Mode.…”

“…Operating System Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Software Platform ROS2 Galactic Geochelone [35] In Figure 4, we install the Raspberry Pi in the middle of the cane handle, and the power supply is placed under the board of the Raspberry Pi. The motor set is installed in the grip part of the cane to provide tactile navigation messages for the user.…”

FogROS 2: An Adaptive and Extensible Platform for Cloud and Fog Robotics Using ROS 2

“…ROS 2 [3], a rapidly growing replacement for ROS [4], is a standard for developing robot applications. FogROS 2 enables moving computationally intensive parts (or nodes) of a ROS 2 computational graph to the cloud and secures communication channel for messages, all with a few small changes to the launch script and without changing a line of the robot code.…”

“…FogROS 2 allows ROS 2 applications to easily use the cloud without code modification, and with secured communication. [3], the successor to Robot Operating System (ROS), includes many substantial improvements. One of the core improvements in ROS 2 is its change from a proprietary pub/sub system to the industry standard middleware Distributed Data Service (DDS).…”

“…We evaluate FogROS 2 in a benchmark on 3 publishes 3000 images to a ROS topic that FogROS 2 transparently compresses and sends to a node in the cloud. We measure the frames per second (FPS) the cloud node receives and the data rate required (kbps).…”