CompShield: Intra-Process Tracing for Detecting Temporal and Concurrency Anomalies in ROS 2
Eunmin KIM, SungYoun JEONG, Jiwon SEO · IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems · 2025
The composition model in ROS 2 enables multiple nodes to run within a single process, reducing the overhead of inter-process communication (IPC). However, this architecture introduces memory safety and concurrency challenges due to a shared address space and a common Executor. Existing tracing tools lack the granularity to detect node-level runtime anomalies in such settings. We present COMPSHIELD, a system that extends ROS2Trace to enable intra-process node-level tracing and misbehavior detection. COMPSHIELD combines static analysis with enhanced runtime tracing to identify temporal anomalies and concurrency-related performance issues, such as Executor monopolization and prolonged callback execution. Evaluation on a ROS 2 composition application shows that COMPSHIELD effectively detects such issues with low overhead.