CSAR: Containerized System Architecture for Robotics

2026-06-29

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenges of dependency isolation, compatibility, reproducibility, and hardware resource sharing in multi-user collaborative and heterogeneous robotic deployments. To this end, it proposes a containerized architecture tailored for robot teams operating within edge–cloud协同 environments. The architecture uniquely integrates system-level containers (LXC/LXD), ROS 2/DDS communication middleware, and a three-tier edge infrastructure—comprising infrastructure core, platform orchestration, and compute acceleration—to enable topology-aware networking, strong isolation, and controllable resource sharing. Experimental validation in a real-world robotic laboratory demonstrates that the proposed approach significantly simplifies software integration, improves resource utilization, and supports secure prototyping alongside reproducible collaborative experimentation.

Abstract

Robotic applications increasingly rely on distributed computational infrastructures that combine embedded devices, edge servers, and cloud resources. This evolution, together with the collaborative nature of robotics projects, has made the development, integration, deployment, and long-term operation of robotic systems significantly more complex. In practice, multi-user robotics software teams face persistent challenges related to dependency isolation, compatibility, reproducibility, efficient sharing of specialized hardware, and deployment across heterogeneous environments. In this paper, we present CSAR (Containerized System Architecture for Robotics), a container-centric architectural framework designed specifically for robotics teams and the edge-cloud continuum. CSAR combines LXC/LXD-based system containerization, ROS 2/DDS-based communication, and a three-layer edge infrastructure to organize computation into hardware-affine, persistent execution environments that remain decoupled from the volatility of experimental workloads. Through its Infrastructure Core, Platform and Multi-User Orchestration, and Compute and Acceleration layers, CSAR provides strong isolation, controlled resource sharing, and topology-aware networking for distributed robotic applications. To demonstrate its validity, we describe a real deployment of CSAR in an academic robotics laboratory and evaluate it through representative use cases involving edge-offloaded 3D SLAM and GPU-accelerated semantic mapping. The results indicate that CSAR simplifies software integration, improves the utilization of shared computational resources, and facilitates safe prototyping, as well as reproducible and collaborative experimentation in robotics teams. The implementation described in this paper, including deployment templates, configuration files, and documentation, is available at https://github.com/goyoambrosio/CSAR.

Problem

• dependency isolation
• compatibility
• reproducibility
• hardware sharing
• heterogeneous deployment

Innovation

• containerization
• edge-cloud continuum
• ROS 2
• system isolation
• robotics infrastructure