A ROS 2 Response-Time Analysis Exploiting Starvation Freedom and Execution-Time Variance

Robots are commonly subject to real-time constraints. To ensure that such constraints are met, recent work has analyzed the response times of processing chains under ROS 2, a popular robotics framework. However, prior work supports only scalar worst-case execution time bounds and does not exploit that the ROS 2 scheduling mechanism is starvation-free. This paper proposes a novel response-time analysis for ROS 2 processing chains that accounts for both the high execution-time variance typically encountered in robotics workloads and the starvation freedom of the default ROS 2 callback scheduler. Experimental results from both synthetic callback graphs and a real ROS 2 workload empirically show the proposed analysis to be much more accurate (often by a factor of 2× or more).