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ROS graph information tools implementation discussion

Next Generation ROS
#15

@gbiggs

I think this overstates the difficulty.

I meant not just implementation difficulty, but also use-time complexity. While not entirely comparable, consider in ROS1, the use of XML-RPC was the root cause of all the mess with ROS_NAME/ROS_IP, and the various DNS resolution issues that led to. At least in my experience, lots of people struggled with that.

You’re taking in an entirely new communications stack, with all the side effects that has.

Sure, you can try and avoid that, for this special case, but that’s just why I’m suggesting that we investigate whether it’s really necessary first, instead of barging headlong into an implementation.

#16

You are right about use-time difficulty; I hadn’t thought of that. The less that can go wrong, the better, from that perspective.

I agree that investigation is necessary. I originally envisioned the ROS tools like rostopic using the DDS stack to get the information, with the REST interface being a convenience thing for makers of tools that benefit from not using the whole ROS stack. @dirk-thomas would prefer it be the other way around, I think.

Anyway, I spent some time today hacking a wholely-unscientific benchmark into the add_two_ints_client example. Here are my results, based on 100 runs on a 2015 macbook pro (because for some reason alpha8 just point blank doesn’t run on my Ubuntu desktop and I haven’t had time to figure out why yet). Times are in seconds.

                         minimum   first quartile median    mean      third quartile  maximum
rclcpp::init             0.000041  0.000049       0.000051  0.000052  0.000053        0.000071
rclcpp:node::make_shared 0.005342  0.005714       0.005867  0.005948  0.006078        0.007536
node->create_client      0.005635  0.005979       0.006139  0.006234  0.006385        0.008588
make_shared request      0.005643  0.005987       0.006147  0.006243  0.006394        0.008600
wait_for_service         0.008758  0.009588       0.010619  0.030617  0.011594        1.011910
async_send_request       0.008900  0.009737       0.010776  0.030780  0.011735        1.012290
receive result           0.224500  0.232855       0.235795  0.251124  0.238558        1.015980
rcpcpp::shutdown         0.224662  0.233006       0.235900  0.251237  0.238677        1.016050
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#17

I would like to second the argument of @iluetkeb about use-time complexity of multiple communication mechanisms, from a different point of view: I have a student working on developer understanding of ROS and the current variety of communication mechanisms, and the consensus about the persons being interviewed is that there are too many of them.

I am all in favor of keeping it simple, and implementation-wise, the original proposal using a daemon and the existing ROS communication mechanism looks very attractive to me. The daemon always runs and has the information available as a ROS service call, plus uses a topic to broadcast changes to the graph such that long-running tools are informed of this.

If later on it turns out that more is needed (e.g. REST API), this can simply be implemented as extra functionality on top of this layer.

#18

I just want to reiterate: the reason why the current command line tools are slow is because they have to wait for the discovery phase to finish before they can query the desired information. The idea of the daemon is that it is already running before and it has already accumulated the information.

If the command line tool wants to use the ROS interface to request information from the daemon it again needs to wait for the discovery phase to finish before it can do so. It might only need to wait for the availability of that daemon but still this implies a significant overhead in waiting time for the user. I don’t think a command line tool (which e.g. is often also used for completion) can have that time penalty. While I am certainly not a big fan of having a different transport mechanism I don’t see how the requirement of the lowest latency possible can be fulfilled with using a distributed peer-to-peer system like DDS.

#19

I guess @iluetkeb point was to use DDS communication, but find a way to avoid the discovery phase in the specific case of connecting to the daemon. It seems to me that letting a tool like rostopic know how to directly connect to the daemon with DDS is not a much different problem from letting the tool know how to connect to the daemon through some other protocol.

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#20

Thanks to @NikolausDemmel for making my point better than I did :wink: Yes, that is exactly what I was tryint to suggest.

if the command line tool wants to use the ROS interface to request
information from the daemon it again needs to wait for the discovery
phase to finish before it can do so.

Not necessarily. See http://eprosima-fast-rtps.readthedocs.io/en/latest/advanced.html#matching-endpoints-the-manual-way, for example.

#21

This functionality would need to be exposed through the rmw interface in an abstract way. And it needs to be implementable with all current vendors. I am not sure that Connext / OpenSplice provide a similar API and if yes how their configuration option differ.

#22

FWIW, http://design.ros2.org/articles/discovery_and_negotiation.html talks about static vs dynamic discovery. The way I understood it static discovery is exactly what we are talking about here (just in this case specifically only for one connection, from tool --> daemon). Is static discovery not within the scope of ROS2? (I believe static discovery is relevant not only for this use case).

An additional advantage of relying on ROS2 communication is that other consumers of the same API that don’t necessarily worry about short start-up time will just as well work using dynamic discovery.

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#23

As for the general question, maybe @Jaime_Martin_Losa could shed some light on this.

For RTI Conext, you can pre-supply discovery peers, at least.

See “add_peer” in https://community.rti.com/static/documentation/connext-dds/5.2.0/doc/manuals/connext_dds/html_files/RTI_ConnextDDS_CoreLibraries_UsersManual/index.htm#UsersManual/ConfigPeersListUsed_inDiscov.htm#discovery_507287096_336417 This seems to be a Conext-specific API.

CoreDX (which you don’t use, but just as another datapoint) goes even further and implements the whole daemon-based central discovery solution for you.

Therefore, it might actually make sense to provide the topic list (or something from which it can directly be derived) in the rmw API, and let the vendor-specific solution use the best vendor-specific approach for supplying it. We would then need to fall back to our own daemon only when necessary.

btw, in general this is not such an outlandish feature, and such an obvious optimization, that I would be very surprised if a vendor did not support some means of realizing it.

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#24

It isn’t necessarily an optimisation from the point of view of a lot of DDS use cases. The lack of need for a central discovery daemon was a major design goal in the way DDS works.

However, there are use cases where it is an optimisation, as you say. Perhaps using that optimisation, when it’s available, via rmw, and providing our own daemon as part of the rmw implementation when it’s not, is a valid implementation.

Thoughts on this approach?

Does anyone (@iluetkeb) have any data on which DDS implementations provide a list of available topics in near-instant time, and which do not? Remember that providing access to the list of topics seen by the participant since it started is not the same thing as what we need. We need something that accumulates the list of topics currently available, including those that the rostopic tool may not have seen itself, and can provide that list on demand. So far the CoreDX implementation that @iluetkeb mentioned sounds like it provides this functionality already, but I’m not aware of any others that do.

One of the reasons for choosing a well-known topic was so that discovery can be short-circuited in DDS implementations that support it.

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#25

Hi guys,

On Fast RTPS you can listen to discovery data:

http://eprosima-fast-rtps.readthedocs.io/en/latest/advanced.html#subscribing-to-discovery-topics

Also, you can set the endpoints for discovery:

http://eprosima-fast-rtps.readthedocs.io/en/latest/pubsub.html#defining-input-and-output-channels

#26

I started writing a prototype of the approach discussed in this thread. But then Worktm had other ideas, as it so often seems to.

The code is up on Github. It’s nowhere near complete, but perhaps there is enough to see where I was going. It’s not just rostopic, it’s intended to be a complete set of command line tools for working with the ROS graph.

I still want to keep working on it myself, but I think progress would be faster as a group effort.

Having said that, there has been activity recently on the ros2 github to implement a rosnode tool directly, so perhaps this work is moot.

#27

@gbiggs: Are you referring to this [0] repo? If so, it’s true that we have two scripts, rosnode_list and rostopic_list, which however are not meant to be in any releasable or complete state. These are mainly the result of debugging tools needed during the current development on our side (they are neither built on the buildfarm nor listed in the repos file) . We are currently not actively working on implementing these tools, given the discussion of this thread and the remaining open questions.
We may add more scripts in that repository, which then can be helpful to others as well, we would though recommend not just yet open PRs against it.

[0] https://github.com/ros2/cli_tools

#28

Yes, that’s the stuff I was talking about, @karsten. Thanks for explaining their purpose.

#29

Hi all, I’d like to kick this thread back up.

Problem:

We are only able to access all nodes and all topics/types.
No equivalent rosnode info exists for ROS2 and these daemon’s are still not available.

Goal

Expose the node graph for gui and cli tools to show the user.
Expose the following per node via rcl API:

  • services
  • subscriptions
  • publications
  • actions

Solution

Regardless of the daemon or on-demand approach to accessing node graph details, exposing the node graph through the rcl layer for tools to use would be advantageous to developers.

These interfaces will be fulfilled via the Simple Discovery Protocol, which uses well-defined unicast and multicast ports for each participant to listen to meta-traffic.

Are there any objections to using SDP to discover the node graph?

ROS2: Security tools for development and production
#30

What do you mean by “daemon” here?

I don’t see a need to introduce a secondary communication protocol. You should be able to retrieve the necessary from the underlying middleware. It will likely require to extend the rmw interface but each existing implementation should be able to provide the necessary information.

#31

I agree with @dirk-thomas. The underlying middleware knows all that stuff already, and DDS has well-defined ports and a discovery protocol. I don’t see any advantage to using SDP, except as an alternative when DDS is not being used as the underlying middleware.

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#32

Regardless of the nature of which tool access’s the node graph, the rcl layer should supply an interface to retrieve the node graph data. This “daemon” refers to the ros2cli daemon that is running for current node graph tools.

SDP IS “Simple Discovery Protocol” which FastRTPS and RTIConnext uses. However there has been some concern to using multicast for discovery in DDS in some production architectures. My proposal is to use the current discovery protocol if there are no objections.

Exactly, however it is not exposed through rcl. I propose I push code to expose this information through the rcl->rmw layer with FastRTPS.

#33

I can’t speak for Dirk, but I got it mixed up with SSDP (Simple Service Discovery Protocol), which is the IETF-defined one. Sorry for the confusion.

There is a daemon provided in the ros2cli repository:

@dirk-thomas added it over a year ago. I haven’t looked into how complete it is or how it compares to the original proposal, but I think the intention is that there is one instance running on each computing node and it can be accessed at a known port on localhost.

I think your proposal to fulfil the interfaces in rcl using SDP doesn’t take into account whether or not this daemon is running.

#34

Exactly, as fulfilling these interfaces does not require a daemon, but it will work with ros2cli’s daemon.

There are quite a few discovery protocols out there, I’ll switch to using full names instead of acronyms when describing approaches.

I will create the pull requests that will expose subscribers and publishers per node and post them here since there does not seem to be any objection using DDS’ Simple Discover Protocol. Then I will demonstrate that capability with ros2cli node info verb.

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