Data Science Talk Series 

TBD (TBD)

Abstract: Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2) has emerged as a widely adopted middleware framework for robotics and autonomous system development. However, deploying ROS 2 in safety-critical domains requires rigorous timing guarantees and schedulability analysis prior to deployment. In this talk, I will present our efforts toward enabling timing-aware and analytically tractable ROS 2-based systems for real-time and safety-critical applications. We first demonstrate how ROS 2 can be systematically integrated with classical real-time scheduling theory, allowing developers to apply well-established schedulability analysis techniques. We then discuss how ROS 2 can be extended to support mixed-criticality systems, a key characteristic of modern robotics and autonomous platforms where tasks of different assurance levels must safely coexist. Overall, this talk aims to bridge the gap between robotics middleware and real-time systems theory, enabling ROS 2 to move closer to deployment in safety-critical cyber-physical systems.

Papers associated with the talk:

1. Arafat, A.A., Vaidhun, S., Wilson, K.M., Sun, J. and Guo, Z., 2022, July.  Response Time Analysis for Dynamic Priority Scheduling in ROS2. In Proceedings of the 59th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (pp. 301-306).

2. Arafat, A.A., Wilson, K., Yang, K. and Guo, Z., 2024.  Dynamic Priority Scheduling of Multi-Threaded ROS 2 Executor with Shared Resources. IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, 43(11), pp.3732-3743.

3. Wilson, K., Arafat, A.A., Baugh, J., Yu, R. and Guo, Z., 2025, May. Physics-Informed Mixed-Criticality Scheduling for F1Tenth Cars with Preemptable ROS 2 Executors. In 2025 IEEE 31st Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS) (pp. 215-227). IEEE.

4. Arafat, A.A., Wilson, K., Ahmed, S. and Guo, Z., 2026, May. Supporting Mixed-Criticality and Mutually Exclusive Callback Groups in Multi-Thread ROS 2. In 2026 IEEE 32nd Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS). IEEE.

Bio of the speaker: Dr. Abdullah Al Arafat is an Assistant Professor at the Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences at Florida International University. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from North Carolina State University. His research is centered on real-time systems, robust learning, and cyber-physical systems. He has published more than 20 papers in top-tier systems conferences (RTSS, RTAS, EMSOFT, CCS, DAC, HSCC, VR) and AI conferences (CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, AAAI). He has received several recognitions, including the Scholar of the Year (Research) Award from the College of Engineering at NC State, the DAC 2022 Publicity Paper, and DATE 2026 best paper award nomination. His work bridges real-time systems and machine learning, addressing challenges in secure and resilient system design for safety-critical applications.