Accurate Sensor Timing in ROS 2
It is crucial to obtain correct and accurate timing in autonomous robotic systems. Complex perception, localisation and planning algorithms rely on combining, or ‘fusing’, data from a multitude of different sensors, which very likely run at different frequencies and out of sync of each other. The sensor data must be timestamped so that their relation in time can be accurately determined. If there is any error in the timestamps, at the very start of the robot’s sense-think-act loop, it will make judgement errors that may be hard if not impossible to recover from. A prime example of ‘garbage in, garbage out’. ...
