FogROS2-SGC:
A ROS2 Cloud Robotics Platform for Secure Global Connectivity

Abstract

The Robot Operating System (ROS2) is the most widely used software platform for building robotics applications. However, ROS2 is designed for robots that operate in a single local area network. With applications like fog robotics, distributed multi-robot systems, remote robot control, and mobile robots, modern robotics increasingly involves the global Internet. Existing solutions for connecting disjoint ROS2 networks lack key features such as security, compatibility, efficiency, and ease of use. 

To this end, we introduce FogROS2-SGC, a cloud robotics platform for connecting robot systems across different physical locations, networks, and Data Distribution Services (DDS). With globally unique and location-independent identifiers, FogROS2-SGC securely and efficiently routes data between robotics components around the globe that may dynamically move between different networks. The platform is agnostic to the ROS2 distribution and configuration and compatible with non-ROS2 software, and it seamlessly extends existing ROS2 applications without any code modification. Experiments suggest FogROS2-SGC is 19× faster than rosbridge (a ROS2 package with comparable features, but lacking security) with 8- kilobyte images and can be applied to a distributed fleet learning system with image data and components that are 3600 km apart. 

The work is accepted by IROS 2023