CHORD: Distributed Data-Sharing via Hybrid ROS 1 and 2 for Multi-Robot Exploration of Large-Scale Complex Environments
Abstract
A well-structured and reliable communication system is key to the successful operations of multi-robot systems. In this letter, we present our design and implementation of a multi-robot communication architecture CHORD (Collaborative High-bandwidth Operations with Radio Droppables) based on two popular robotics middleware, ROS 1 and ROS 2. We discuss the benefit and best practices of combining two different frameworks that share the same spirit and show its performance from large-scale real-world experiments. The proposed system is developed as part of Team CoSTAR's effort for the DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge. The system has been field-proved and demonstrated in the Urban Circuit event, where team CoSTAR won first place. To our knowledge, this work is the first real-world demonstration of a ROS 2-based multi-robot system in such large-scale extreme environments. From the significant improvement of the communication performance and the ease of transition from existing ROS 1 systems, this work encourages wider adoption of ROS 2 in field robotics applications.
Additional Information
© 2021 IEEE. Manuscript received October 13, 2020; accepted February 3, 2021. Date of publication February 26, 2021; date of current version April 21, 2021. This letter was recommended for publication by Associate Editor S. Tang and Editor M. Ani Hsieh upon evaluation of the reviewers' comments. This work was supported by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This work was partially funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (80NM0018D0004). We gratefully acknowledge William Walsh, Gregory Miles, Carlyn Ann Lee, and Gustavo Correa for the useful discussions and contributions to the initial work of our communication system.Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 108331
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20210305-113040169
- 80NM0018D000
- NASA/JPL/Caltech
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
- Created
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2021-03-08Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-04-30Created from EPrint's last_modified field