A Seamless Integration of Fault-Tolerant and Real-Time Capabilities for Robot Operating System (ROS)

Robot Operating System (ROS) is an open-source framework for the development of modular robotics applications. It provides a component-based middleware and interface abstraction to standardize the integration of distributed applications using the DDS standard. However, ROS in its current version is not suitable for safety and real-time systems. It does not support QoS policies for dynamic reconfiguration and fault recovery. This work starts by identifying the relevant QoS policies in the DDS standard related to fault-tolerant to integrate them in ROS-2. Second, these QoS policies are completed by the specification of timing constraints, and then an approach is proposed for seamless integration of fault tolerance and real-time capabilities in ROS-2. A typical case study of a real-time geo-localization application has been developed to evaluate the proposed approach for autonomous vehicle.