{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,22]],"date-time":"2026-04-22T17:05:27Z","timestamp":1776877527096,"version":"3.51.2"},"reference-count":24,"publisher":"Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)","issue":"3","funder":[{"name":"National Science Foundation","award":["CNS-2340171"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["CNS-2340171"]}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":["dl.acm.org"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":["ACM Trans. Internet Things"],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2026,8,31]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>Autonomous systems built on ROS2 are increasingly deployed in safety- and performance-critical domains such as autonomous driving and mobile robotics. While existing research has proposed various timing analyses and scheduling strategies for ROS2, many rely on simplified assumptions that do not hold in real-world applications. In this article, we present a detailed empirical study of ROS2-based autonomous applications, uncovering underexplored runtime behaviors that significantly impact both real-time and functional performance. These include the importance of partial cause-effect chains, dynamic execution paths and timing variability, non-FIFO data access patterns, and computation threads uncontrolled by ROS2 executors. We extend an existing tracing tool to support Transform Library and ROS2\u2019s Action entity, enabling reconstruction and analysis of realistic cause-effect chains. Our findings are validated through experiments in simulated autonomous robot scenarios and a case study using the Autoware autonomous driving framework. Together, our results highlight the need for rethinking ROS2 modeling, scheduling and analysis to better reflect the realities of autonomous systems.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/3772083","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,17]],"date-time":"2025-10-17T09:19:08Z","timestamp":1760692748000},"page":"1-30","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Uncovering Underexplored Runtime Behaviors in ROS2-Based Autonomous Systems"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"7","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-3824-2377","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Chenghao","family":"Fan","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Harbin Institute of Technology","place":["Harbin, China"]}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-2079-1252","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Lanshun","family":"Nie","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Harbin Institute of Technology","place":["Harbin, China"]}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0009-0149-4990","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Jiacheng","family":"Zhang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Harbin Institute of Technology","place":["Harbin, China"]}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0008-0684-5545","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Kun","family":"Dai","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Harbin Institute of Technology","place":["Harbin, China"]}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0009-0004-5582-1516","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Shenghan","family":"Gao","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Harbin Institute of Technology","place":["Harbin, China"]}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-6865-7290","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Jing","family":"Li","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"New Jersey Institute of Technology","place":["Newark, United States"]}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,22]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_3_1_2_2","first-page":"1","volume-title":"Proceedings of the Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference and Exhibition","author":"Abaza Hazem","year":"2024","unstructured":"Hazem Abaza, Debayan Roy, Shiqing Fan, Selma Saidi, and Antonios Motakis. 2024. 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