Splash on ROS 2: A Runtime Software Framework for Autonomous Machines

ROS has been completely refactored and evolved into ROS 2 to address the ever-increasing software complexity of autonomous machines. While it has become a de facto standard software platform for autonomous machines, ROS 2 still has room for improvement. It lacks support for essential features such as real-time stream processing, mode change, sensor fusion and rate control for output shaping. Moreover, its programming model is at a lower level than what most programmers would expect.In this paper, we carefully analyze the shortcomings of ROS 2 and propose to augment it with the Splash programming framework. In doing so, we host Splash on top of the ROS 2 software stack by conducting model conversion between Splash and ROS 2. We refer to the end result as Splash on ROS 2. To show its viability, we conducted a case study with a robot arm controller performing DNN-based object detection and motion planning. The case study qualitatively confirms that Splash on ROS 2 relieves the programming burden on developers, increases the software development productivity and improves the quality of the software.