How stable is ROS for long-term operations?
Hi!
We are considering using ROS for an industrial robot application. The application requires that we need to run the robot for more than 100 days continuously without errors (software crash, etc) and human intervention. The use of ROS with its topics/services/etc. will considerably reduce development time for our application, but how will ROS perform for long term testing?
Anyone who has experience with long-term testing of systems running on ROS (e.g., > 10 days continuous operations)?
(Note: the "Office Marathon" by Willow Garage is perhaps one example of relatively long-term testing, but that was still "only" for 30 hours operation)
I think that the answers to this question will depend heavily on the particular packages (and libraries) being used, whether nodes are listed as required, and what hardware is being used. You should probably specify ones that you may be interested in..
Thanks for the comment trinighost. We are planning on mostly writing our own nodes/packages, but we are considering making use of ROS-industrial, the OROCOS toolchain for realtime operations, and the BFL. HW is to be decided on. My main concern is the main ROS functions such as message passing.
If you're worried about the core services and want to know how robost ROS is in an industrial env I would suggest taking a cut and branching from there. So you can throughtly test what you need to work. Then move forward with that. Factor back in updates as you need them.
You might have a look at Baxter from rethink robotics. It's pretty early in its life, but they're marketing it, so I'd be surprised if it wasn't fairly reliable. (I have no experience with it btw.)