Connecting ROS to a real-time control framework for embedded computing

Modern robotic systems tend to get more complex sensors at their disposal, resulting in complex algorithms to process their data. For example, camera images are being used map their environment and plan their route. On the other hand, the robotic systems are becoming mobile more often and need to be as energy-efficient as possible; quadcopters are an example of this. These two trends interfere with each other: Data-intensive, complex algorithms require a lot of processing power, which is in general not energy-friendly nor mobile-friendly. In this paper, we describe how to move the complex algorithms to a computing platform that is not part of the mobile part of the setup, i.e. to offload the processing part to a base station. We use the ROS framework for this, as ROS provides a lot of existing computation solutions. On the mobile part of the system, our hard real-time execution framework, called LUNA, is used, to make it possible to run the loop controllers on it. The design of a ‘bridge node’ is explained, which is used to connect the LUNA framework to ROS. The main issue to tackle is to subscribe to an arbitrary ROS topic at run-time, instead of defining the ROS topics at compile-time. Furthermore, it is shown that this principle is working and the requirements of network bandwidth are discussed.