RTCF: A framework for seamless and modular real-time control with ROS

Abstract

Owing to the steady progress in the field of Linux kernel development, high-performance control applications are no longer a rarity on general-purpose computing platforms. However, many real-time control libraries lack important properties such as modularity, effortless integration, and encapsulation. These are key design features of the popular Robot Operating System (ROS) that is, however, not real-time capable. We aim to solve this issue by introducing the Real-Time Control Framework (RTCF), which offers high modularity, ROS-related concepts leading to seamless interoperability with ROS, and high performance. To demonstrate the capabilities of the RTCF, we provide several examples and exemplary performance data.