Hideki Takase
Kyoto University/ JST PRESTO, Japan
mROS: How to integrate ROS components into the embedded devices
Download SlidesAbstract
Robot Operating System (ROS) is a state of the art component oriented development framework led by Open Robotics. This talk firstly describes advantages of ROS on the robot development process. ROS can accelerate the development of robot systems by configuring and connecting abundant open-source ROS packages. Another aspect of ROS is a communication middleware based on publish/subscribe model. ROS nodes communicate with each other via topic. An arbitrary node publishes data to a topic and other nodes can subscribe data from the topic. roscore, the master of ROS system, manages advertisement of node information. In addition, ROS provides powerful tools and a world-wide friendly community to help robot system designers. Although there are a lot of useful packages available from ROS1, which is a widely used version, you must employ Linux/Ubuntu to execute ROS1 nodes. It means that you have to select high-performance and power-hunger processors, such as AARCH64 or x64 CPU. The latter part of this talk will present our work about mROS, that enables embedded processors to be integrated to ROS1 systems. mROS is a lightweight runtime environment to run a ROS1 node on embedded systems. mROS is assumed to operate on edge devices in distributed network systems. We employ lwIP as a TCP/IP protocol stack that is included in ARM mbed library, and TOPPERS/ASP kernel as a real-time operating system to realize ROS communication. You can design mROS nodes with native ROS APIs. In addition, you can develop embedded device drivers with mbed library. Moreover, ITRON programming model could help you if you wish to realize multi-tasking. Our work would contribute to the portability of ROS1 packages to embedded systems, and enhancement of power saving and real-time performance for edge nodes on distributed robot systems.
Biography
Hideki Takase is an Assistant Professor at Kyoto University, and also a PRESTO researcher at Japan Society and Technology Agency. He received the PhD degree in Information Science from Nagoya University in 2012. His research interest includes runtime platforms and system-level design methodologies for embedded/real-time/IoT computing. He is one of organizing committee of ROSCon JP 2019.