[ros-users] A Multithreaded alternative to ROS Multi Master

[Daniel Stonier]

On 8 March 2014 05:19, Ganesh Kumar <gpkumar at asu.edu> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Consider a simulation of multiple robots in gazebo, using a single ROS
> Master. To get this robot team to accomplish specific tasks in a
> decentralized way, I need to get them to implement specific distributed
> algorithms - for example, leader election and consensus.
>
> I am considering developing a ROS Package that implements some of these
> algorithms using multithreading. Each robot in the robot has a thread, so
> that the system as a whole is multithreaded. This is in lieu of the
> multiple processes that are used in the distributed computing literature.
>
> I intend this to be a simpler alternative to ROS Multimaster for
> simulating a robot team. And perhaps, the same kind of algorithms could be
> used for Multiple masters to coordinate among themselves.
> I wonder if any one has any general comments on this? How useful would
> such an exercise be?
>
> Thanks!
> Ganesh P Kumar
> Arizona State University
>

There's one benefit that I can see spawning simulated gazebobots over
multimaster - that is you can run real robot code on top of whatever gazebo
is simulating in each master. Later if you want to slip out gazebo for the
real robots, then it's almost zero effort.

If however you just want to concentrate on the algorithms for leader
election and consensus etc, the multithreaded approach would be a lighter
way to do rapid prototyping of such things. However you'll have to work out
how to cross a few bridges (emulating various multi-robot inputs and later
transfer to real systems) along the way if you want it to get onto a real
ros multimaster system.

We're playing around with the gazebo backend at the moment to bootstrap
robots on multiple masters at the moment. The guys at austin are running a
very rough proof of concept right now and we're hoping to see some effort
go into it over the next couple of months.

Daniel.


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