Modeling and Analysis of Inter-Process Communication Delay in ROS 2

Abstract

ROS 2, the second-generation ROS, is a popular development framework for real-time robotic software. To ensure the timing correctness of applications based on ROS 2, one must model the time delay incurred by two aspects: computation and communication. While significant work has been conducted on computing delay, formal modeling and analysis of communication delay in ROS 2 is still an open issue. In this paper, we first present a formal description on the timing behavior of inter-process communication in ROS 2 with two typical communication policies, namely the InterestTree policy and FIFO policy, and then develop analysis techniques to upper-bound the incurred delay. We conduct experiments to validate the correctness and evaluate the efficacy of our method with case studies on realistic platform.