ROS SOME/IP bridge

Proof of concept project which tries to create a bridge between vsomeip / common-api and ROS linux environment.

Problem definition

Make SOME/IP data available in ROS2 natively.

Simulation

To simulate real GPS/GNSS data coming from the receiver we would use gpsfake tool together with a text file containing small set of real NMEA messages. Can be obtained from https://www.nmeagen.org/.

Architecture

• We would use open source SOME/IP stack implementation (COVESA/GENIVI)
• gpsd daemon + gpsfake utility
• SOME/IP broadcast’s published as ROS2 topics.

UDS = Unix Domain Socket (used by GENIVI stack for communication between router and clients on localhost)

Limitations

We will limit our scope by making available only SOME/IP broadcast messages as topics, with string messages which contain data in json format.

Open points

• Parse FIDL/FDEPL files to generate bridge glue code automatically
• Add support for different data types (i.e. ROS topic datatypes)
• Think of potential configuration (mapping between topics and SOME/IP events)
• Think how to handle outgoing data (requests)
• Think how to handle attributes

  How it works

To simulate remote ECU which broadcasts GNSS data over the network using UDP packets with SOME/IP serialised payload we would use dedicated docker container Docker.server.

At the same time to receive those PDUs we would run another dedicated docker container Docker.client.

to run the setup simply execute (tested in ubuntu 20.04):

    make run

to rebuild the contains without running execute:

    make compose

Development

To simplify compilation and testing of the changes there is possibility to enter docker container, using:

    make enter-build-env

then you can use shortcuts like

    make colcon-build

to build all packages in the repository. Or, if you like to build them separately use

    make gnss-provider
    make gnss-bridge
    make gnss-someip-lib
    make gnss-listener

Tips

I will put here some tips / tricks to not to forget.

Cleanup docker networks

    docker network prune

Links

• https://colcon.readthedocs.io/en/released/user/how-to.html
• https://hub.docker.com/_/ros
• https://docs.ros.org/en/foxy/Tutorials/Composition.html
• https://docs.ros.org/en/foxy/Tutorials/Topics/Understanding-ROS2-Topics.html
• https://docs.ros.org/en/foxy/Tutorials/Understanding-ROS2-Nodes.html