ROS-I Computer - Recommended RT - Operating System

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Thanks Adolfo for your answer. Just an additional point of clarification, the ROS-I interfaces as originally conceived would allow for individual point streaming. At a low level some driver work this way (i.e. points are queued on the PC side and sent to the controller one at a time). Other drivers send the whole trajectory all at once. This difference is primarily driven by the controller. Not all controllers were designed to take points one at a time. Unfortunately, at a ROS level, point streaming is not well supported. Much of ROS is built around calculating a full trajectory before sending it to the controller. Trajectories can be stopped during execution, but altering them was never really supported. All this means that dynamically changing the trajectories on the fly is only available on those controllers that support trajectory streaming and only at a code level (not a ROS message level).

A lean C++ TCP/IP app on standard Linux can achieve latency in the order of 100 micro-seconds without a lot of jitter (only caveat is you need all power mgt disabled in BIOS). With the large amount of processing needed for ROS/visualization/collision detection, a standard version of Linux will not likely be the limiting factor. If you need sub 100 micro-second, you will need an RT OS.