Robot Operating System 2

William R Michalson,Vincenzo DiLuoffo,Berk Sunar

doi:10.1177/1729881418770011

William R Michalson, Vincenzo DiLuoffo + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/1729881418770011

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Abstract

It is no secret that robotic systems are expanding into many human roles or are augmenting human roles. The Robot Operating System is an open-source standard for the robotic industry that enables locomotion, manipulation, navigation, and recognition tasks by integrating sensors, motors, and controllers into reusable modules over a distributed messaging architecture. As reliance on robotic systems increases, these systems become high value targets, for example, in autonomous vehicles where human life is at risk. As Robot Operating System has become a de facto standard for many robotic systems, the security of Robot Operating System becomes an important consideration for deployed systems. The original Robot Operating System implementations were not designed to mitigate the security risks associated with hostile actors. Robot Operating System 2, the next generation of the Robot Operating System, addresses this shortcoming, leveraging Data Distributed Services for its messaging architecture and Data Distributed Services security extension for its data protection in motion. This article provides a systematic review of Robot Operating System 2 and identifies potential risks for this new robotic system paradigm. A Robot Operating System 2 robotic system is viewed as a series of layers from the hardware that include sensors, motors, and controllers to the software layers, which include the operating system, security services, protocols, messaging, and the cognitive layer for observation, learning, and action. Since Robot Operating System 2 and security are new considerations for robotics systems as they move into mainstream, many questions emerge. For example, can some portions be secure and other portions be non-secure? Does everything need to be secure? What are the trade-offs between, security, performance, latency and throughput? What about real-time robotic systems? This article provides an overview of the Robot Operating System 2 paradigm and represents a first step toward answering these questions.

Highlights

Robot Operating System (ROS) 2 was introduced in 2014 but was first available as alpha code in 3Q2015
This research is based on the ROS 2 Beta 2/3 code base and the early access release 5.3 of the Real-Time Innovations (RTI) implementation of Distributed Services (DDS) with security extensions enabled for data protection in motion (DIM)
Robotic security is a new and increasing concern and is not as mature as security for computers and mobile devices, there are many potential holes in the security architecture of a robotic system that need to be analyzed with respect to the threats unique to robotic systems

Summary

Introduction

Robot Operating System (ROS) 2 was introduced in 2014 but was first available as alpha code in 3Q2015. Security specification extension was released later in 2016, for secure messaging. ROS 2 is still in its early stages of development with Beta 1 released in December 2016, Beta 2 in July 2017, Beta 3 in September, and first release in December 2017 called Ardent Apalone. The implementation of security functionality is being pushed out beyond the first release according to the ROS 2 road map.[1] This research is based on the ROS 2 Beta 2/3 code base and the early access release 5.3 of the Real-Time Innovations (RTI) implementation of DDS with security extensions enabled for data protection in motion (DIM). This article applies to Ardent Apalone release as well, since the underlining DDS implementation is based on RTI 5.3

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