Transactional Transform Library for ROS

Abstract

In the Robot Operating System (ROS), a major middleware for robots, the Transform Library (TF) is a mandatory package that manages transformation information between coordinate systems by using a single-rooted directed tree and providing methods for registering and computing the information. However, the tree has two fundamental problems. The first is its poor scalability: since it accepts only a single thread at a time due to using a single giant lock for mutual exclusion, the access to the tree is sequential. Second, there is a lack of data freshness: it retrieves non-latest synthetic data when computing coordinate transformations because it prioritizes temporal consistency over data freshness. In this paper, we propose methods to solve these problems. First, we decentralize the giant lock to provide performance scalability and show that this results in a throughput 243 times higher than conventional TF on a read-only workload. Second, we design transactional methods based on serializable protocols that prevent anomalies, thus retrieving the freshest data. These transactional methods show a freshness up to 1276 times higher than the conventional one on a read-write combined workload.