Exploring Real-Time Executor on ROS 2

Abstract

With the recent developments in robotics research, autonomous robot systems have grown rapidly to meet the increasing demands. The Robot Operating System (ROS) is commonly used for building autonomous robot systems. Due to the high latency in communication, ROS has been upgraded to ROS 2 using the Data Distribution Service (DDS) as a transport system. In ROS 2, an Executor concept was introduced to support execution management and ensure real-time performance. However, it is difficult to improve the real-time performance of ROS 2. A real-time executor called the Callback-group-level Executor has been developed in micro-ROS. In this paper, the Callback-grouplevel Executor was used to replace the standard rclcpp Executor in ROS 2, and explore the resulting performance. Using the pingpong test bench, the potential and constraints of the real-time executor on ROS 2 were also examined and evaluated.