Data Flow Analysis in ROS

This paper presents an enhancement to the Robot Operating System (ROS), which provides statistics about the data flow between nodes inside the ROS framework. These statistics measurements include message frequency, transportation delay and other metrics on connections between ROS nodes. We enhanced an existing ROS tool, which displays connections between nodes, so that it also displays these measurements. On this basis, we further present a change detection mechanism, using these measurements to detect errors and provide an overall robot health status.