RTeX: an Efficient and Timing-Predictable Multi-threaded Executor for ROS 2

Robot operating system (ROS) is a widely used robotic software development framework. In safety-critical applications that require timing guarantees, the first generation of ROS falls short. The introduction of ROS 2 has addressed some of these limitations, but its multithreaded executor still struggles to meet real-time requirements. To address this issue, we design a new multithreaded executor called RTeX for ROS 2. The goal of RTeX is to improve system performance in terms of both run-time efficiency and timing predictability. We have implemented RTeX in the latest version of ROS 2 and conducted experiments on a real platform. The experimental results demonstrate that RTeX outperforms both the default ROS 2 multithreaded executor and its state-of-the-art variant, achieving significant real-time performance improvements.