ROS 2 for RoboCup
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There has always been much motivation for sharing code and solutions among teams in the RoboCup community. Yet the transfer of code between teams was usually complicated due to a huge variety of used frameworks and their differences in processing sensory information. The RoboCup@Home league has tackled this by transitioning to ROS as a common framework. In contrast, other leagues, such as those using humanoid robots, are reluctant to use ROS, as in those leagues real-time processing and low-computational complexity is crucial. However, ROS 2 now offers built-in support for real-time processing and promises to be suitable for embedded systems and multi-robot systems. It also offers the possibility to compose a set of nodes needed to run a robot into a single process. This, as we will show, reduces communication overhead and allows to have one single binary, which is pertinent to competitions such as the 3D-Simulation League. Although ROS 2 has not yet been announced to be production ready, we started the process to develop ROS 2 packages for using it with humanoid robots (real and simulated). This paper presents the developed modules, our contributions to ROS 2 core and RoboCup related packages, and most importantly it provides benchmarks that indicate that ROS 2 is a promising candidate for a common framework used among leagues.
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