Work-in-Progress: Design Concept of a Lightweight Runtime Environment for Robot Software Components Onto Embedded Devices

Although ROS (Robotic Operating System) has attracted attention to enhance the productivity of robot software development, it is necessary to adopt the device with high function and large power consumption enough to install Linux. This paper designs a lightweight runtime environment of ROS nodes onto mid-range embedded devices. Our environment, that is named to mROS, consists of a real-time OS and TCP/IP protocol stack to provide a tiny ROS communication library. mROS provides the connectivity to host and other ROS nodes with the native ROS network protocol. One of advantages for mROS is that native ROS nodes can be ported from Linux-based systems to RTOS-based systems since APIs with the same name of native ROS can be used in the embedded program. Experimental results validate that the performance requirement of mROS can be achieved for the construction of distributed robot systems.