mROS: A Lightweight Runtime Environment for Robot Software Components onto Embedded Devices.

The Robot Operating System (ROS) has attracted attention as a design platform for robot software development. One of the problems of ROS is that it is necessary to adopt high-performance and power-hunger devices as ROS requires a Linux environment for operation. This paper proposes a novel solution called mROS, which is a lightweight runtime environment of ROS nodes, to execute robot software components on mid-range embedded devices. mROS consists of a real-time OS and TCP/IP protocol stack to provide a tiny ROS communication library. It provides connectivity from the edge node to the host and other nodes through the native ROS protocol. Experimental results confirmed that mROS meets the performance requirement for practical applications. We further conducted a case study to validate the portability of mROS from ROS nodes. Our work would contribute to the power minimization and real-time performance enhancement of mobile robot systems.