Behavioral Analysis of ROS motion planners integrated with Robotics Middleware Framework (RMF)

Abstract

Robot operating system (ROS) is one of the most popular middleware for robot applications, being integrated with the majority of projects in robotics. Since the rollout of ROS2 having an improved communication stack than ROS1 with its real-time data distribution service (DDS) protocol, the problem of robot interoperability has been one of the most sought problems. Although many different multi-robot management frameworks have been developed, only a few of them are open-sourced. In this paper, we present a study that evaluates one such interoperability framework called “Robotics Middleware Framework (RMF)”. Herein, RMF is integrated with “Free Fleet” an open-source robot fleet management system and tested with various path planning algorithms on different possible real-world test scenarios. The outcome of this study gives an insight into the performance of path planners in complex scenarios.