Autoware_Perf: A tracing and performance analysis framework for ROS 2 applications

Abstract

This paper proposes Autoware_Perf, a tracing and performance analysis framework for ROS 2 applications, such as Autoware.Auto. According to our survey, ROS 2 Tracing is an expected trace tool for measuring Autoware.Auto. However, ROS 2 Tracing can measure only the callback execution time of ROS 2 nodes running in the current system; it cannot measure node execution time and cannot measure yet the inter-node communication latency. Here we provide an improvement that arbitrarily selects the nodes for ROS 2 Tracing and provide a framework, which is based on ROS 2 Tracing, to measure the end-to-end latency of Autoware.Auto. Using this framework, we analyzed the trace data of ROS 2 systems generated by ROS 2 Tracing packages, and visualized the trace data as a graph. Autoware_Perf facilitates real-time performance evaluations but cannot measure yet all types of messages. Finally, we measure Autoware.Auto by improved ROS 2 Tracing and measure the end-to-end latency of Autoware.Auto by the proposed framework.