Energy efficiency in ROS communication: a comparison across programming languages and workloads

Abstract

Introduction: The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a widely used framework for robotic software development, providing robust client libraries for both C++ and Python. These languages, with their differing levels of abstraction, exhibit distinct resource usage patterns, including power and energy consumption-an increasingly critical quality metric in robotics. Methods: In this study, we evaluate the energy efficiency of ROS two nodes implemented in C++ and Python, focusing on the primary ROS communication paradigms: topics, services, and actions. Through a series of empirical experiments, with programming language, message interval, and number of clients as independent variables, we analyze the impact on energy efficiency across implementations of the three paradigms. Results: Our data analysis demonstrates that Python consistently demands more computational resources, leading to higher power consumption compared to C++. Furthermore, we find that message frequency is a highly influential factor, while the number of clients has a more variable and less significant effect on resource usage, despite revealing unexpected architectural behaviors of underlying programming and communication layers.