Unit 15: Robot Communication and Distributed Systems

One robot can contain many computers

As vision, navigation, control, logging, and operator tools separate onto different processors, the interfaces become part of the robot.

Robots Are Distributed Computers maps the nodes and responsibilities. Messages, Buses, Latency, and Failure adds timing and bandwidth. From One Controller to ROS 2 explains why robotics middleware exists without turning this Unit into a ROS 2 tutorial.

Design an interface, not a line between boxes

Keep a communication architecture plus at least three interface contracts.

For each high-consequence data path, define producer, consumer, meaning, units, rate, maximum acceptable age, and invalid-data behavior.

A component can be locally correct while the system still fails because information is stale or delayed. That is the failure mode to learn here.

Where this course stops

You will see nodes, messages, interfaces, and distributed failure as concepts. The dedicated ROS 2: For Students course owns hands-on ROS 2 packages, topics, services, actions, launch, DDS, and tooling. This Unit gives you the architecture that makes those tools make sense.