A Reliable and Low Latency Synchronizing Middleware for Co-simulation of a Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Systems

Abstract

Search and rescue, wildfire monitoring, and flood/hurricane impact assessment are mission-critical services for recent IoT networks. Communication synchronization, dependability, and minimal communication jitter are major simulation and system issues for the time-based physics-based ROS simulator, event-based network-based wireless simulator, and complex dynamics of mobile and heterogeneous IoT devices deployed in actual environments. Simulating a heterogeneous multi-robot system before deployment is difficult due to synchronizing physics (robotics) and network simulators. Due to its master-based architecture, most TCP/IP-based synchronization middlewares use ROS1. A real-time ROS2 architecture with masterless packet discovery synchronizes robotics and wireless network simulations. A velocity-aware Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) technique for ground and aerial robots using Data Distribution Service (DDS) publish-subscribe transport minimizes packet loss, synchronization, transmission, and communication jitters. Gazebo and NS-3 simulate and test. Simulator-agnostic middleware. LOS/NLOS and TCP/UDP protocols tested our ROS2-based synchronization middleware for packet loss probability and average latency. A thorough ablation research replaced NS-3 with EMANE, a real-time wireless network simulator, and masterless ROS2 with master-based ROS1. Finally, we tested network synchronization and jitter using one aerial drone (Duckiedrone) and two ground vehicles (TurtleBot3 Burger) on different terrains in masterless (ROS2) and master-enabled (ROS1) clusters. Our middleware shows that a large-scale IoT infrastructure with a diverse set of stationary and robotic devices can achieve low-latency communications (12% and 11% reduction in simulation and real) while meeting mission-critical application reliability (10% and 15% packet loss reduction) and high-fidelity requirements of mission-critical applications..