Stream Processing in the Robot Operating System framework

Abstract: Streams of information rather than static databases are becoming increasingly important with the rapid changes involved in a number of fields such as finance, social media and robotics. DyKnow is a stream-based knowledge processing middleware which has been used in autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) research. ROS (Robot Operating System) is an open-source robotics framework providing hardware abstraction, device drivers, communication infrastructure, tools, libraries as well as other functionalities. This thesis describes a design and a realization of stream processing in ROS based on the stream-based knowledge processing middleware DyKnow. It describes how relevant information in ROS can be selected, labeled, merged and synchronized to provide streams of states. There are a lot of applications for such stream processing such as execution monitoring or evaluating metric temporal logic formulas through progression over state sequences containing the features of the formulas. Overviews are given of DyKnow and ROS before comparing the two and describing the design. The stream processing capabilities implemented in ROS are demonstrated through performance evaluations which show that such stream processing is fast and efficient. The resulting realization in ROS is also readily extensible to provide further stream processing functionality.