You do not have to include the ROS Master as an executable of a component if it is meant to run on the cloud. The platform manages running ROS Master for you on the cloud and the container preinstalled device runtime.
In the special case where the user chooses to use the preinstalled runtime on the device it is not possible for rapyuta.io to ascertain the state and configuration of your system in a non-invasive manner. Here we require the user to ensure it is started before platform tools interact with it. The user could handle this during device boot, or ensure it is added in the corresponding package as an executable.
The unique communication architecture in rapyuta.io solves many of the challenges associated with running ROS1 across multiple robots in a local network or even across the public internet.
It provides first-class support for ROS topics, services, and actions, adding crucial features like QoS, compression, transport multiplexing, authentication, encryption, etc. while protecting you against adverse effects of transient network errors.
A ROS service call is blocking in nature. It prevents the client thread from continuing to execute further instructions until it receives a reply from a ROS server. Occasionally, the service call waits much longer than expected, and in more adverse cases, the call never returns due to software or network failure. Hence, further execution of the client program is stalled.
rapyuta.io defines ROS service timeout as the number of seconds to wait for a response to the service request before timing out and erroring out. The application developer must add appropriate logic to handle these exceptions as required. The default timeout is 120 seconds.
The platform adopts a declarative approach to describing the ROS interfaces (topics/services/actions) your application publishes or provides. This information is later used by the platform while binding/linking different deployments together to automatically proxy the right information to the correct deployment. It works for arbitrary message types and only requires the user to providing topic/service/action names and zero changes to your application source.
rapyuta.io offers a tunable level of reliability for ROS topics for the transport layer even over the public internet. The QoS (quality of service) attribute of the package reflects this function. The offered and the recommended uses cases are as follows:
The highest possible QoS is Maximum by using end to end protocol delivery confirmations, message ordering guarantees, and retires in case of failure. It is typically intended for one-off critical control/command messages. e.g. : Start/Stop application
The lowest possible QoS is Low and is used for rapidly produced data such as sensor/telemetry data where the application can tolerate small message loss in favor of better performance, throughput, and lower latency.
These are intermediate levels offered between the two extremes that may be more suited in more intermediate cases. Each level trades off to balance reliability and performance differently.
The user may optionally enable transparent compression. The platform relies on “snappy” compression algorithm. Compression is not free. You usually pay a small penalty, with messages long repeats and sparse data such as laser scans, maps, etc. The benefits of a reduced payload more than compensate for this penalty and let the user send much larger volumes of data over the communication link.
ROS has several key pain points when working with multi-robot systems that often need error-prone setups involving specific launch sequences, roslaunch/xml files, and remappings. rapyuta.io ships with special support for multi-robot systems and enforces runtime identities to robots automatically wrap and unwrap for the right agent.
Learn more about dedicated ROS communication support
In complex dependency patterns rapyuta.io allows parent-child relations where a package must whitelist ROS interfaces it can bind to from a child as inbound ROS interfaces.