ROS 2 for RoboCup

There has always been much motivation for sharing code and solutions among teams in the RoboCup community. Yet the transfer of code between teams was usually complicated due to a huge variety of used frameworks and their differences in processing sensory information. The RoboCup@Home league has tackled this by transitioning to ROS as a common framework. In contrast, other leagues, such as those using humanoid robots, are reluctant to use ROS, as in those leagues real-time processing and low-computational complexity is crucial. However, ROS 2 now offers built-in support for real-time processing and promises to be suitable for embedded systems and multi-robot systems. It also offers the possibility to compose a set of nodes needed to run a robot into a single process. This, as we will show, reduces communication overhead and allows to have one single binary, which is pertinent to competitions such as the 3D-Simulation League. Although ROS 2 has not yet been announced to be production ready, we started the process to develop ROS 2 packages for using it with humanoid robots (real and simulated). This paper presents the developed modules, our contributions to ROS 2 core and RoboCup related packages, and most importantly it provides benchmarks that indicate that ROS 2 is a promising candidate for a common framework used among leagues.