Dynamic Binding a Proper DDS Implementation for Optimizing Inter-Node Communication in ROS2

Abstract

ROS2 (Robot Operating System 2.0) has been being developed from scratch in order to support new applications. One of the most significant change in ROS2 is to follow the DDS standard specification as an interface of the inter-module communication. Currently some of companies and OSS communities provide DDS implementations which have different characteristics such as using the shared memory. The current implementation of ROS2 allows to specify only one DDS implementation to be used in a system through application code or the environment variable at running, nevertheless each communication may have different characteristics and each DDS implementation may be optimized for different communication types. This research proposes a mechanism to allow multiple DDS implementations existing in a system and to dynamically bind one into each communication. The proposed mechanism can estimate communication area, maximum data size, requirement of the QoS control, for each communication channel and then it can select a proper DDS implementation. We clarify that the current available DDS implementations have different characteristics, and then describe implementation of the DDS dynamic binder mechanism.