A Semantic Gateway for UAV Interoperability: Bridging ROS 2 and Asset Administration Shell

The integration of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) into Industry 4.0 ecosystems is severely hampered by a critical lack of interoperability. This challenge, stemming from diverse platforms, incompatible protocols, and heterogeneous data structures, creates a semantic gap that hinders collaboration between systems. To address this gap, this paper presents a semantic gateway that bridges the Asset Administration Shell (AAS) specification with the Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2) framework, enabling structured alignment of UAV telemetry data. Unlike existing static adapters, the proposed architecture provides a resilient, asynchronous pattern specifically optimized for the strict constraints of aerial robotics, including high-frequency telemetry, limited onboard computation, and intermittent network connectivity. The gateway’s effectiveness is rigorously evaluated through controlled benchmarks, high-fidelity software-in-the-loop (SITL) simulations, and edge hardware deployments. Results demonstrate that the configurationdriven transformation model maintains internal processing latency below 5ms, making it transparent to primary flight-control loops, while preserving digital twin consistency during network disruptions without introducing state “ghosting” effects upon reconnection. The evaluation focuses on the semantic consistency of runtime data transformation rather than full cross-system semantic interoperability. Although demonstrated for UAVs, the gateway provides a generalizable architectural pattern for integrating other mobile ROS-based assets into Industry 4.0 ecosystems. This study offers a practical, validated approach to making robotic systems compatible with AAS, indicating potential reduction in industrial integration effort and enabling seamless multi-agent operations.