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. FogROS2 extends ROS2 to allow robots to access cloud computing on demand. We introduce FogROS2-SGC, an extension of FogROS2 that can effectively connect robot systems across different physical locations, networks, and Data Distribution Services (DDS). With globally unique and location-independent identifiers, FogROS2-SGC can securely and efficiently route data between robotics components around the globe. FogROS2-SGC is agnostic to the ROS2 distribution and configuration, is compatible with non-ROS2 software, and seamlessly extends existing ROS2 applications without any code modification. We evaluate FogROS2-SGC with 4 robots and compute nodes that are 3600 km apart. Experiments suggest FogROS2-SGC is 19x faster than rosbridge (a ROS2 package with comparable features, but lacking security). Videos and code are available on the website https://sites.google.com/view/fogros2-sgc.