APPROACHES TO MIDDLEWARE UNIFICATION FOR ROBOTIC SYSTEMS ON THE ELBRUS HARDWARE–SOFTWARE PLATFORM
Abstract
Import substitution of hardware–software control systems is a key enabler for the development of Russia’s domestic robotics industry. The limited software ecosystem of Russian computing platforms still constrains their use in onboard computing systems (OCS) of robotic systems (RS), even though modern domestic multicore processors—such as the Elbrus—offer competitive performance and energy efficiency. ROS (Robot Operating System) and its successor ROS 2 are widely adopted for robotics software development, but official support is largely restricted to x86 and ARM architectures running mainstream Linux distributions. At the same time, a substantial amount of deployed application software remains ROS-based, while ROS 2 continues to evolve rapidly. This creates a practical need to support both ROS and ROS 2 on domestic hardware–software platforms. This work investigates approaches to unifying robotics middleware based on ROS and ROS 2 for the Elbrus platform. We implemented two porting strategies: (1) application-level binary translation and (2) a fully native build. The native approach included adapting architecture-specific dependencies, modifying architecture-dependent code, and producing Debian (deb) packages. We then evaluated both approaches under multiple runtime configurations, including scenarios where ROS and ROS 2 operate together. Experimental results confirm that the Elbrus platform can be integrated into the modern robotics software ecosystem. They also show that the native implementation delivers higher performance than the binary-translated solution. The proposed work expands the toolchain available for robotics development on domestic platforms and reduces technological dependence when building control systems for robotic systems.
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