ROS 2 Can Finally Evaluate Your DAG Scheduler: Autoware as a Real-Time Systems Research Platform

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Authors:

Takahiro Ishikawa-Aso

Abstract:

"Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2) is an active target for real-time systems research, and Autoware, the largest open-source ROS 2 application deployed on public roads in commercial autonomous driving, is an established evaluation target. This talk describes how recent middleware contributions, CallbackIsolatedExecutor (CIE) and Agnocast, officially adopted into Autoware make it a more attractive platform for DAG scheduling research. CIE and Agnocast address two critical gaps limiting Autoware as a research platform: nested scheduling and Inter-Process Communication (IPC) overhead. ROS 2 scheduling has long assumed nested scheduling (joint consideration of both Executor and OS thread scheduler), introducing artificial complexity into scheduling models. CIE makes the Executor layer transparent, enabling OS scheduling parameters to be applied directly to callbacks as DAG vertices and making preemptive static-priority DAG scheduling on Linux possible. Agnocast, an API-compatible replacement for rclcpp (ROS 2 C++), enables true zero-copy IPC for arbitrary ROS message types, such that edge latency between DAG vertices becomes negligible. Both contributions are available across the ROS community, providing a concrete path for real-time research results to reach production systems."