research-article

Towards reliable and scalable robot communication

Authors:

Natalia Chechina,

Gerardo Aragon-Camarasa,

Phil TrinderAuthors Info & Claims

Erlang 2016: Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Erlang

Pages 12 - 23

https://doi.org/10.1145/2975969.2975971

Published: 23 September 2016 Publication History

Abstract

The Robot Operating System (ROS) is the de facto standard platform for modern robots. However, communication between ROS nodes has scalability and reliability issues in practice. In this paper, we investigate whether Erlang's lightweight concurrency and reliability mechanisms have the potential to address these issues. The basis of the investigation is a pair of simple but typical robotic control applications, namely two face-trackers: one using ROS publish/subscribe messaging, and the other a bespoke Erlang communication framework.

We report experiments that compare five key aspects of the ROS and Erlang face trackers. We find that Erlang communication scales better, supporting at least 3.5 times more active processes (700 processes) than its ROS-based counterpart (200 nodes) while consuming half of the memory. However, while both face tracking prototypes exhibit similar detection accuracy and transmission latencies with 10 or fewer workers, Erlang exhibits a continuous increase in the total time taken to process a frame as more agents are added, and we identify the cause. A reliability study shows that while both ROS and Erlang restart failed computations, the Erlang processes restart 1000--1500 times faster than ROS nodes, reducing robot component downtime and mitigating the impact of the failures.

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Cited By

Kumar TGanesh CMuthukumaran N(2024)Smart Navigation and Management of Vehicle Teleportation Using Qt ROS GUIWireless Personal Communications10.1007/s11277-024-11470-z137:3(1903-1916)Online publication date: 5-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-024-11470-z
Partap AGrayson SHuzaifa MAdve SGodfrey BGupta SHauser KMittal R(2022)On-Device CPU Scheduling for Robot Systems2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9982085(11296-11303)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9982085
Zou YBai J(2021)Effective Crash Recovery of Robot Software Programs in ROS2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)10.1109/ICRA48506.2021.9560876(9498-9504)Online publication date: 30-May-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA48506.2021.9560876
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Towards reliable and scalable robot communication
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language features

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

Erlang 2016: Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Erlang

September 2016

61 pages

ISBN:9781450344319

DOI:10.1145/2975969

General Chairs:
Melinda Toth,
Scott Lystig Fritchie

Copyright © 2016 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 23 September 2016

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Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council

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ICFP'16

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SIGPLAN

ICFP'16: ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming

September 23, 2016

Nara, Japan

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 51 of 68 submissions, 75%

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ICFP '25

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sigplan

ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming

October 12 - 18, 2025

Singapore , Singapore

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Cited By

Kumar TGanesh CMuthukumaran N(2024)Smart Navigation and Management of Vehicle Teleportation Using Qt ROS GUIWireless Personal Communications10.1007/s11277-024-11470-z137:3(1903-1916)Online publication date: 5-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-024-11470-z
Partap AGrayson SHuzaifa MAdve SGodfrey BGupta SHauser KMittal R(2022)On-Device CPU Scheduling for Robot Systems2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9982085(11296-11303)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9982085
Zou YBai J(2021)Effective Crash Recovery of Robot Software Programs in ROS2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)10.1109/ICRA48506.2021.9560876(9498-9504)Online publication date: 30-May-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA48506.2021.9560876
Valkov ITrinder PChechina N(2021)Reliable distribution of computational load in robot teamsAutonomous Robots10.1007/s10514-021-09967-8Online publication date: 2-Feb-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-021-09967-8
Trinder PChechina NPapaspyrou NSagonas KThompson SAdams SAronis SBaker RBihari EBoudeville OCesarini FStefano MEriksson Sfördős VGhaffari AGiantsios AGreen RHoch CKlaftenegger DLi HLundin KMackenzie KRoukounaki KTsiouris YWinblad K(2017)Scaling ReliablyACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems10.1145/310793739:4(1-46)Online publication date: 17-Aug-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3107937

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