Enhancing Mobile Robotics through Efficient Communication and Scalability

The standard communication middleware, DDS (Data Distribution Service), struggles to keep up with the demands of mobile robots in wireless environments, leading to connectivity issues and limited scalability.

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One emerging protocol gaining attention is Zenoh, which addresses many challenges faced by mobile robotics. Its robust, scalable communication in dynamic environments positions it as a promising alternative to DDS, and several companies have already begun adopting it to overcome their current limitations. The discussion with Angelo Corsaro, CEO & CTO, ZettaScale covers Zenoh’s advantages over DDS in addressing connectivity, scalability, and reliability issues in mobile robotics, its integration with existing systems, technical challenges faced during its development, and future enhancements.

● The team that designed Zenoh had contributed massively to the design and standardization of DDS, and built commercial implementations for more than a decade.

● DDS was designed to address resourceful and closed distributed systems connected by reliable fixed networks, i.e., wired LAN. The target application that drove the definition of DDS was Naval Combat Management Systems. As a consequence, the design inherently assumes that the network is well dimensioned, it has extremely low packet losses and, as such, that UDP multicast operates effectively.

Can you explain how Zenoh differs from DDS in terms of addressing the connectivity challenges faced by mobile robots in wireless environments?

Zenoh was born out of the desire to solve two problems, (1) having a protocol that could run efficiently and scale from the microcontroller up to the data-center, and (2) providing a single framework to deal with data in motion (pub/sub) and data at rest (store/query). As a consequence Zenoh was designed as a protocol that can run efficiently on wired and wireless networks, without topological constraints. Additionally the dynamic discovery mechanisms built in Zenoh are completely different that those found in DDS.