How Fast is My Software? Latency Evaluation for a ROS 2 Autonomous Driving Software

Violations of real-time properties and high latencies have emerged as crucial issues in autonomous vehicles since they can lead to unwanted vehicle behavior and critical maneuvers. Our study aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of latencies in a software stack for autonomous vehicles. In this paper, we present an evaluation workflow to inspect software and the occurring latencies for ROS 2 applications. This workflow was used to analyze the open-source autonomous driving stack Autoware. Universe by showing the influence of different soft- and hardware configurations. Our focus is on the evaluation of end-to-end, communication, computation, and idle latencies. Based on the results, we show the bottlenecks and motivate future directions to optimize ROS 2 autonomous driving software.