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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Robot. AI
Sec. Computational Intelligence in Robotics
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frobt.2025.1548250
This article is part of the Research Topic Robotics Software Engineering View all 8 articles

Energy Efficiency in ROS Communication: A Comparison Across Programming Languages and Workloads

Provisionally accepted
Michel Albonico Michel Albonico 1*Manuela Bechara Canizza Manuela Bechara Canizza 1Andreas Wortmann Andreas Wortmann 2
  • 1 Federal University of Technology, Paraná, Francisco Beltrão, Brazil
  • 2 University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a widely used framework for robotic software development, providing robust client libraries for both C++ and Python. These languages, with their differing levels of abstraction, exhibit distinct resource usage patterns, including power and energy consumption -an increasingly critical quality metric in robotics.Methods: In this study, we evaluate the energy efficiency of ROS 2 nodes implemented in C++ and Python, focusing on the primary ROS communication paradigms: topics, services, and actions.Through a series of empirical experiments, with programming language, message interval, and number of clients as independent variables, we analyze the impact on energy efficiency across implementations of the three paradigms.Results: Our data analysis demonstrates that Python consistently demands more computational resources, leading to higher power consumption compared to C++. Furthermore, we find that message frequency is a highly influential factor, while the number of clients has a more variable and less significant effect on resource usage, despite revealing unexpected architectural behaviors of underlying programming and communication layers.

    Keywords: ROS, energy efficiency, Programming language, ROS Communication, robotic

    Received: 19 Dec 2024; Accepted: 29 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Albonico, Canizza and Wortmann. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Michel Albonico, Federal University of Technology, Paraná, Francisco Beltrão, Brazil

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.