Benchmarking Different Strategies for Offloading ROS2 Computation to the Edge

Mobile robots suffer from inherent limitations due to the tradeoff in the amount of energy consumed by their on-board processing components, and the need to increase their operational time. On the communication side, the volatility of communication links severely hinders the ability of a mobile device to rely on computation offloading. The challenge addressed by this paper is the development of a methodology and framework to effectively migrate the location of a service from a system to another, minimizing downtime and striving to reduce any side-effects that may be perceived by the system. Solving this challenge will pave the way for more effective computation offloading solutions that can cope with the unpredictability of the edge systems. Four different approaches are analyzed experimentally, suggesting that solutions based on ROS2 Lifecycle Nodes are significantly more effective in addressing the aforementioned challenge compared to the other options.