ROS-SF: A Transparent and Efficient ROS Middleware using Serialization-Free Message

In recent years, ROS becomes the dominant middleware for robotic systems. The performance of its message-passing paradigm is crucial to the robot's reaction time. However, previous works only focus on efficiency, but ignore the requirement for transparency. We present ROS-SF framework, which can transparently eliminate serialization and de-serialization under the ROS APIs. The key contributions are a new serialization format called SFM and a life-cycle management method for serialization-free messages. Evaluation results show that our ROS-SF framework can improve the message-passing performance of ROS by up to 76.3\%. Application case study and applicability study show that our ROS-SF framework can be transparently applied to many existing ROS-based systems and packages. Even in the failure cases, our ROS-SF framework can provide modification guidance.