Resource Manager for Scalable Performance in ROS Distributed Environments

Daisuke Fukutomi1,a, Takuya Azumi2, Shinpei Kato3 and Nobuhiko Nishio1,b
1Graduate School of Information Science and Engineering, Ritsumeikan University, Japan
atommy@ubi.cs.ritsumei.ac.jp
bnishio@is.ritsumei.ac.jp
2Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Saitama University, Japan
takuya@mail.saitama-u.ac.jp
3Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, Japan
shinpei@pf.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp

ABSTRACT


This paper presents a resource manager to achieve scalable performance in Robot Operating System (ROS) for distributed environments. In robotics, using ROS in distributed environments via multiple host machines is trending for largescale data processing, for example, cloud/edge computing and the data communication of point clouds and images in dynamic map composition. However, ROS is unable to manage the resources (e.g., the CPUs, memory, and disks) on each host machine. Therefore, it is difficult to use distributed environmental resources efficiently and achieve scalable performance. This paper proposes a resource management mechanism for ROS distributed environments using a master-slave model to execute ROS processes efficiently and smoothly. We manage the resource usage of each host machine and construct a mechanism to adaptively distribute the load to be balanced. Evaluations show that scalable performance can be achieved in ROS distributed environments comprising ten host machines using a real application (SLAM: simultaneous localization and mapping) processing large-scale point cloud data.



Full Text (PDF)