Design a monitoring architecture that safely collects, stores, and visualizes performance data from EtherCAT-based 1kHz real-time control loops. Maintain RT determinism while capturing debugging data using Lock-free SPSC Queues and ROS2 topic layering.
We share the process of optimizing acceleration feedforward control for a 6-axis robot arm. By using planner acceleration + LPF instead of numerical differentiation, we achieved 21.2% improvement in position RMSE and torque stability simultaneously.
We validate with measured data whether PREEMPT_RT kernel and CPU isolation alone can enable 1kHz EtherCAT control on NVIDIA Jetson Orin. Under GPU, Storage, and EtherCAT load conditions, we achieved max latency below 20us.
The factor determining IPC performance in robot control systems is the synchronization mechanism, not process boundaries. We share a case study achieving 100x improvement from 78-103us with Mutex to 0.74-0.82us with Lock-free.
We measured whether atomic memory ordering could be a performance bottleneck in a 1kHz RT loop on Jetson Orin (Cortex-A78AE). On AArch64, the cost of seq_cst is virtually identical to release/acquire, and the total cost of 25 atomic operations is less than 0.01% of the 1ms budget.