Madrid, October 2019
eProsima is happy to announce a collaboration with the OTTO Motors division of Clearpath to deploy ROS 2 in systems with a large number of robots.
ROS 2, the next generation of the "Robot Operating System" global standard framework for robotics, is being used heavily in applications such as autonomous driving, artificial vision or video streaming. Most of these applications involve the exchange of large amounts of data, and some of them increase the complexity even further by additionally requiring a large number of robots. One of such examples is the case of the OTTO Motors industrial self-driving vehicles, where a fleet manager is in charge of the operation and control of large fleets of robots using ROS 2 and Fast RTPS for communication over a wireless network. The OTTO Motors robot communication API makes use of dozens of topics per robot to exchange both time sensitive data as well as guaranteed delivery command and state information, even when presented with challenging network environments and security requirement.
eProsima and OTTO Motors have used this scenario to collaborate on a study of scalability of the broader ROS 2 framework, during both the discovery phase and in the steady state.
The first iteration of this work enabled heterogeneous systems which can manage several dozens autonomous vehicles simultaneously, and proved to be successful in terms of memory usage and performance. The target is now to continue expanding to enable centralized management of fully lights-out facilities, for which a dedicated and fully customizable test framework is being developed.
The majority of these improvements are being open-sourced for the benefit of the global robotics community.
About eProsima:
eProsima is a SME company focused on high performance network middleware with special attention to the OMG (Object Management Group) standard called Data Distribution Service (DDS) for real-time systems.
The company's main product is eProsima Fast RTPS, a lightweight DDS Open Source implementation, exposing direct access to the underlying protocol, the Real Time Publish Subscribe (RTPS) Protocol.
eProsima shows its expertise as a key contributor of the Robotic Operating System (ROS), being Fast RTPS the default middleware for ROS 2.
About OTTO Motors:
OTTO™ Motors is making material handling in industrial settings safer, easier, and more efficient through development of hardware and software that automates movement of goods in busy factories and warehouses. The company's industry-leading self driving technology provides automated and on-demand material handling in the most demanding industrial environments, spanning automotive, medical device, aerospace, logistics, and more.
Customers trusting their mission-critical material handling needs to OTTO™ Motors include Fortune 100 brands GE, Toyota, and Caterpillar. For more information visit www.ottomotors.com
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