Efficient Tailoring of Universal Software Components for Conserving Resources: Evaluation in Practical ROS-based System

The method of development for robot systems is shifting toward rapid and efficient construction utilizing universal software components, such as various common libraries and operating systems, with tailored implementations rather than programming from scratch. The Robot Operating System (ROS), which is becoming widely used as a robotics infrastructure, is built on the Linux operating system, which has been commonly used in PC and server environments. However, many universal software components may contain functionalities and implementation codes that are unnecessary in certain cases, and these may have negative impacts, especially on resource-constrained platforms. Unfortunately, identifying and eliminating unnecessary code appropriately is a difficult process because it requires a deep understanding of the system behavior and implementation details of the component.This study proposes a dynamic analysis method and tools to help determine the necessity of each functionality of the Linux kernel, one of the largest universal software components in a ROS-based system, on the basis of energy and memory consumption. To evaluate the practicality of the proposal, we conduct an experimental application in a practical ROS-based robot system. The results show that even without understanding the details of the whole kernel, memory consumption can be reduced by about 40% by efficiently disabling unnecessary features.