Concept development of a modular system for marine applications using ROS2 and micro-ROS

The use of compact underwater vehicles for deep see exploration is still a big challenge in terms of available energy, reliability and robustness. Due to limited payload capacity these vehicles have to be equipped with narrow mission specific hardware. At the same time those vehicles still have to provide suitable navigation as well as actuation and communication solutions not unlike larger more capable vehicles. Using small compact vehicles in the deep sea requires different setups or at least a rapidly reconfigurable system that shares common building blocks in hardware and software in order to perform tasks. To this end this paper addresses the concept and development of a ROS2 based modular soft- and hardware architecture, which allows to decentralize and distribute different tasks by using microcontroller equipped modules in order to take advantage of a distributed data communication framework such as DDS (Data Distribution Service) and thus implement the microcontroller-oriented operating system (micro-ROS) in conjunction with ROS2 in the marine robotics domain. We report on initial tests and sea evaluations and consequently present an outlook toward the implementation of a new class of AUVs.