A ROS package for dynamic bandwidth management in multi-robot systems

Abstract

Communication is an important component in robotic systems. The application goals such as, finding a victim or teleoperate a robot in an obstacle avoiding application, may get affected if there are problems in communication between system agents. The developed package, dynamic_bandwidth_manager (DBM), was designed to maximize bandwidth usage in multi-robot systems. DBM controls the rate that a node publishes a topic, managing different channels where commands, sensory data and video frames are exchanged. In this tutorial chapter, we present several important concepts that are crucial to work with robot communication using ROS: (1) how the increasing number of robots makes an impact on communication, (2) the ROS communication layer (topics and services using TCP and UDP), (3) how to analyze the bandwidth consumption in a system developed in ROS, and (4) how use DBM to manage bandwidth usage. A detailed tutorial on developed package is presented. It shows how DBM is designed in order to prioritize communication channels according to environment events and how the most important topics gets more bandwidth from the system. This tutorial was developed under Ubuntu 15.04 and for ROS Jade version. All presented components are published on our ROS package repository: http://wiki.ros.org/dynamic_bandwidth_manager.