FogROS2-SGC: A ROS2 Cloud Robotics Platform for Secure Global Connectivity

Abstract: The Robot Operating System (ROS2) is the most widely used software platform for building robotics applications. FogROS2 extends ROS2 to allow robots to access cloud computing on demand. However, ROS2 and FogROS2 assume that all robots are locally connected and that each robot has full access and control of the other robots. With applications like distributed multi-robot systems, remote robot control, and mobile robots, robotics increasingly involves the global Internet and complex trust management. Existing approaches for connecting disjoint ROS2 networks lack key features such as security, compatibility, efficiency, and ease of use. We introduce FogROS2-SGC, an extension of FogROS2 that can effectively connect robot systems across different physical locations, networks, and Data Distribution Services (DDS). With globally unique and location-independent identifiers, FogROS2-SGC securely and efficiently routes data between robotics components around the globe. FogROS2-SGC is agnostic to the ROS2 distribution and configuration, is compatible with non-ROS2 software, and seamlessly extends existing ROS2 applications without any code modification. Experiments suggest FogROS2-SGC is 19x faster than rosbridge (a ROS2 package with comparable features, but lacking security). We also apply FogROS2-SGC to 4 robots and compute nodes that are 3600km apart. Videos and code are available on the project website https://sites.google.com/view/fogros2-sgc.