1.4 KiB
Design
Plan for ROS 2 tracing & analysis effort.
Steps
This general effort will be split into a few distinct steps.
Instrumentation
The first goal is to statically instrument ROS 2, aiming for it to be in the ROS 2 E-turtle release (Nov 2019).
This includes transposing the existing ROS 1 instrumentation to ROS 2, wherever applicable. This step may not include instrumenting DDS implementations, and thus may be limited to the layer right before rmw.
The plan is to use LTTng with a ROS wrapper package like tracetools for ROS 1.
Analysis
After the initial instrumentation, some general statistics analyses can be built. The targeted analysis tools are pandas and Jupyter. The goal is to make those general enough to be useful for different use-cases, e.g.:
- Callback duration (mean, stdev, etc.)
Generic tracepoints should also be provided for ROS 2 user code, which could then be applied to a user-provided model for higher-level behaviour statistics.
Tools/accessibility
To make tracing ROS 2 more accessible and easier to adopt, we can put effort into integrating LTTng session setup & recording into the ROS 2 launch system.
This might include converting existing tracetools scripts to more flexible Python scripts, and then plugging that into the launch system.
ROS 1/2 compatibility
Finally, we could look into making analyses work on both ROS 1 and ROS 2, through a common instrumentation interface (or other abstraction).