Scaling robots -
summary
Compares ROS (Kinetic/Melodic) and ROS2 (Crystal) on a laptop and fleets of cheap Raspberry Pi robots (~£250 each), measuring latency, throughput and a discovered communication scaling limit volume that stays constant for a given hardware and depends on node count, frequency and message size. Finds ROS2 latencies around 2–5 ms versus ROS melodic/kinetic up to 35–500 ms; shows Erlang-style let it crash with share nothing actor supervision tolerates killing ~50% of processes and recovers, while ROS setups fail after ~10% killed. Uses recorded sensor/video traces; advises benchmark middleware and OS for target workload.
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chapters (17)
- 0:00Introduction to robot scaling
- 1:06What defines a robot
- 2:34Types of robots
- 6:08Robot Operating System overview
- 8:57ROS scalability challenges
- 10:00Small-scale ROS experiments
- 12:34Robot hardware setup
- 13:14Designing simple robot experiments
- 15:18Communication scaling limits
- 18:34OS and middleware impact
- 20:22ROS 2 performance gains
- 22:07Fault tolerance differences
- 23:57Erlang and defensive programming
- 29:24Erlang in real-world systems
- 30:10Non-defensive programming in robotics
- 33:20Key lessons learned
- 34:23Q&A on communication volume
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