RIOT-ROS2: Low-Cost Robots in IoT Controlled via Information-Centric Networking

In the future, IoT devices will be part of the robotics ecosystem, and the border between IoT and robotics will blur. Already today, we observe converging trends between low-end IoT devices and minibots (i.e. tiny, cheap robots) concerning their hardware, and open source software. In this paper, we explore the potential of programming minibots with the open source robotics software framework ROS2, running on top of the IoT operating system RIOT; we call the fruitful association of both elements RIOT-ROS2. In this article, the emphasis is particularly on the networking layer: using an inprination-centric networking (ICN) paradigm, we design and implement the communication primitives for RIOT-ROS2. We further evaluate the performance of our design on prototype minibots based on cheap, off-the-shelf hardware elements. We show that RIOT-ROS2 fits on low-end robotics hardware such as a System-on-Chip costing under $2, based on an ARM Cortex-M0+ microcontroller. Our experiments also show that the latency incurred with our information-centric approach is acceptable for minibot control, even on a low throughput IEEE 802.15.4 radio.