A first look at ROS 2 applications written in asynchronous Rust

Abstract

The increasing popularity of the Rust programming language in building robotic applications using the Robot Operating System (ROS 2) raises questions about its real-time execution capabilities, particularly when employing asynchronous programming. Existing real-time scheduling and response-time analysis techniques for ROS 2 focus on applications written in C++ and do not address the unique execution models and challenges presented by Rust's asynchronous programming paradigm. In this paper, we analyze the execution model of R2R -- an asynchronous Rust ROS 2 bindings and various asynchronous Rust runtimes, comparing them with the execution model of C++ ROS 2 applications. We propose a structured approach for R2R applications aimed at deterministic real-time operation involving thread prioritization and callback-to-thread mapping schemes. Our experimental evaluation based on measuring end-to-end latencies of a synthetic application shows that the proposed approach is effective and outperforms other evaluated configurations. A more complex autonomous driving case study demonstrates its practical applicability. Overall, the experimental results indicate that our proposed structure achieves bounded response times for time-critical tasks. This paves the way for future work to adapt existing or develop new response-time analysis techniques for R2R applications using our structure.