Space-Robot Operating System Performance Evaluations

In this paper, an integrated performance analysis method for Space-ROS is presented through the integration of the Chain Aware ROS2 Performance Evaluation Tool (CARET). The objective is high observability and reliability for ROS2based robotics systems in space missions. With this integration, comprehensive performance metrics-such as resource usage, responsiveness of nodes, and various kinds of latency-are collected in a systematic manner. Certain latency metrics, such as callback latency, communication latency, node-level latency, and end-to-end latency, are recorded to obtain fine-grained information regarding the timing behavior of ROS nodes. CARET has been incorporated into the Space-ROS framework with extended capability to facilitate space-based test scenarios. It enables precise monitoring of performance between nodes and identification of critical bottlenecks in demo applications and core algorithms. Experimental results show that CARET effectively uncovers hidden latency issues and enables performance tuning, and as a result, is an effective tool for ensuring real-time performance in mission-critical space robotics systems.