ROS-CBT: Communication Benchmarking Tool for the Robot Operating System: Extended Abstract

Simulation plays a critical role in robotics as it allows verification and it provides evaluations of robot software before real world deployment [1]. One prevalent limitation of robotic simulators that support the Robot Operating System, ROS [2] - a de facto standard for developing robotic software - is the absence of communication simulators. This poses a serious challenge in testing software for multi-robot systems (MRS) that use explicit communication, hence limiting the development of this technology. Figure 1 illustrates the problem tackled in this paper.