Benchmarking of ROS 2 executors for Distributed Real-Time Systems

Abstract

While the Robot Operating System (ROS) first developed in 2007 has experienced a lot of success in a variety of fields, and was even reworked into ROS 2 to provide support for real-time systems [1, 2], it is still not widely used in this capacity. Mainly, because there are still some improvements needed, to be able to seriously compete with specialized solutions. Executors, for example, play a large role in the real-time capabilities of any system because they are responsible for handling all the callbacks produced by running processes on a level above the operating system, like timers or subscriptions. [3] Because standard ROS 2 executors do not offer the desired safety and real-time properties needed for ROS 2 to be a feasible platform option for the automotive industry and specifically SDVs, where any software application must fulfill very specific safety requirements, different companies have started developing new executor variants, in hopes of fixing these flaws and enabling ROS 2 to become more widely usable. One of these developments is the Deterministic Data-Driven (DDD) Executor by TTTech Auto. It was created with the aim of improving the determinism, real-time behaviour and performance of a ROS 2 communication application. In this thesis, the DDD Executor, as well as other standard or recently developed executors, are benchmarked using different circumstances and testing environments. The benchmarks are based on the simulated Autoware reference system and evaluate the performance of the executors during the sending of messages through all the different nodes in this system. The results of these benchmarks show varying performance of the executors, for example influenced by additional computational load. Altogether, the DDD Executor was amongst the best performing competitors, with the standard ROS 2 executors being left behind for the most part. With an average start-to-end latency of less than 33 ms, even under additional CPU load, this new executor might be the solution ROS 2 needs to expand into the SDV field.

Date of Award	2025
Original language	English
Supervisor	Walter Rokitansky (Supervisor)