DewROS2: A platform for informed Dew Robotics in ROS

Abstract

With the shift from Cloud to Fog and Dew Robotics a lot of emphasis of the research community has been devoted to task offloading. Effective and efficient resource monitoring is however necessary for such offloading and it is also fundamental for other important safety and security tasks. Despite this, robot monitoring has received little attention in general and also for Robot Operating System (ROS) the most employed framework in robotics. In this paper DewROS2 is presented, a platform for Dew Robotics that comprises entities to monitor the system status and to share it with interested applications. The design and implementation of the platform is presented together with the monitoring entities created. DewROS2 has been deployed on different real devices, including an unmanned aerial vehicle and an industrial router, to move from theory to practice and to analyze the impact of monitoring on robot resources. DewROS2 has also been tested in a search and rescue use case where robots are used to collect and transmit videos to spot signs of humans in trouble. Results in controlled and uncontrolled conditions show that the monitoring nodes do not have a significant impact on the performance while providing important and measurable benefits to the applications. Accurately monitoring of robot resources, for example, allows the search and rescue application to almost double the utilization of the network, therefore collecting video at a much higher resolution.