QRB ROS Transport

Overview

QRB ROS Transport is designed for hardware-acceleration friendly transporting of messages on Qualcomm robotics platforms. It uses type adaption to make message data zero-copy between different ROS nodes, and different hardwares. It includes adapted types for Qualcomm robotics platforms.

Type Adaptation Feature (REP 2007) has enabled on ROS 2 Humble. This interface will allow us to define methods for serializing directly to the user requested type, and/or using that type in intra-process communication without ever converting it.

qrb_ros_transport is based on lib_mem_dmabuf, it is open sourced and apply to all platforms based on Linux.

dmabuf_transport is a zero-copy transport implementation for all platforms based on Linux, it only depends on Linux standard DMA buffer APIs.

System Requirements

• Linux kernel version 5.12 and later, for kernel dma-buf support.

• ROS 2 Humble and later, for type adaption support.

Quickstart

Currently, we only support build with QCLINUX SDK.

1. Setup QCLINUX SDK environments follow this document: Set up the cross-compile environment

2. Create ros_ws directory in <qirp_decompressed_workspace>/qirp-sdk/

   mkdir -p <qirp_decompressed_workspace>/qirp-sdk/ros_ws
   

3. Clone this repository and dependencies under <qirp_decompressed_workspace>/qirp-sdk/ros_ws

   cd <qirp_decompressed_workspace>/qirp-sdk/ros_ws
   git clone https://github.com/quic-qrb-ros/lib_mem_dmabuf.git
   git clone https://github.com/quic-qrb-ros/qrb_ros_imu.git
   git clone https://github.com/quic-qrb-ros/qrb_ros_transport.git
   

4. Build projects

   export AMENT_PREFIX_PATH="${OECORE_TARGET_SYSROOT}/usr;${OECORE_NATIVE_SYSROOT}/usr"
   export PYTHONPATH=${PYTHONPATH}:${OECORE_TARGET_SYSROOT}/usr/lib/python3.10/site-packages
   
   colcon build --merge-install --cmake-args \
     -DPython3_ROOT_DIR=${OECORE_TARGET_SYSROOT}/usr \
     -DPython3_NumPy_INCLUDE_DIR=${OECORE_TARGET_SYSROOT}/usr/lib/python3.10/site-packages/numpy/core/include \
     -DPYTHON_SOABI=cpython-310-aarch64-linux-gnu -DCMAKE_STAGING_PREFIX=$(pwd)/install \
     -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=$(pwd)/install/share \
     -DBUILD_TESTING=OFF
   

Packages

• qrb_ros_transport
  • Quickstart
  • Supported Types
• lib_mem_dmabuf
  • Overview
  • Quickstart
  • API
• dmabuf_transport
  • Overview
  • QuickStart
  • Supported Types

Supported Platforms

This package is designed and tested to be compatible with ROS 2 Humble running on Qualcomm RB3 gen2.

Hardware	Software
Qualcomm RB3 gen2	LE.QCROBOTICS.1.0

Resources

• ROS 2 Type Adaption: ROS 2 new feature to implement zero copy transport.

• Linux dma-buf: Linux kernel subsystem for sharing buffers for hardware (DMA) access across multiple device drivers and subsystems, and for synchronizing asynchronous hardware access

• lib_mem_dmabuf: Library for access and interact with Linux DMA heaps.

Updates

Date	Changes
2024-7-12	Add Imu type support
2024-3-28	Initial release