Drums: A Middleware-Aware Distributed Robot Monitoring System

Abstract

We introduce Drums, a new tool for monitoring and debugging distributed robot systems, and a complement to robot middleware systems. Drums provides online time-series monitoring of the underlying resources that are partially abstracted away by middleware like ROS. Interfacing with the middleware, Drums provides de-abstraction and de-multiplexing of middleware services to reveal the system-level interactions of your controller code, the middleware, OS and the robot(s) environment. We show worked examples of Drums' utility for debugging realistic problems, and propose it as a tool for quality of service monitoring and introspection for robust autonomous systems.