Quantitative analysis of communication handling for centralized multi-agent robot systems using ROS2

Multi-agent robot systems, specifically mobile robots in dynamic environments interacting with humans, e.g., assisting in production environments, have seen an increased interest over the past years. To better understand the ROS2 communication in a network with a high load of nodes, this paper investigates the communication handling of multiple robots to a single tracking node for centralized multi-agent robot systems using ROS2. Thereore, a quantitative analysis of two publisher-subscriber communication architectures and a comparative study between DDS vendors (CycloneDDS, FastDDS and GurumDDS) using ROS2 Galactic is performed. The architectures of consideration are a many-to-one approach, where multiple robots communicate to a central node over one topic, and the one-to-one communication approach, where multiple robots communicate over particular topics to a central node. Throughout this work, the increase in the number of robots at different publishing rates is simulated on a single computer for the different DDS vendors. A further simulation is done using a distributed setup with CycloneDDS. The simulations show that with an increase in the number of nodes, the average data age and the data miss ratio in the one-to-one approach were significantly lower than in the many-to-one approach. CycloneDDS was shown as the most robust regarding crashes and response time under system launch, while FastDDS showed better results regarding the data ageing.