Assessment of Communication Protocols’ Latency in Co-processing Robotic Systems

The evolution of robotic systems supporting coprocessing can limit a multitude of uses and their effective deployment in real life. Although computing time still accounts for a non-negligible part of system performance, communication latency is increasingly relevant, as the growing use of heterogeneous co-processing in complex systems makes communication among elements a performance bottleneck. To undertake this coming challenge, this work evaluates the efficiency of a set of relevant communication protocols supported in ROS-based systems with co-processing. Results show UDP is the best choice for the transport layer, especially for high-performance systems. TCP-based communication can nonetheless play a role in low-end co-processing robotics.