Pick & Place Pipeline Benchmark#

This benchmark measures KPI performance of the Pick & Place Simulation — a stationary arm pipeline where two UR5 robotic arms coordinate with a TurtleBot3 AMR on a conveyor belt using Nav2 and MoveIt2.

The ROS2 KPI toolkit automates the full experiment lifecycle: launching the simulation, waiting for it to stabilize, capturing metrics, then cleanly stopping the simulation and aggregating KPI results.

Prerequisites#

Complete the Installation Guide and ensure the Pick & Place simulation runs successfully before benchmarking.

Single Run#

picknplace-run launches picknplace warehouse.launch.py, waits 30 seconds for the simulation to stabilize, captures GPU and resource metrics for 120 seconds, then sends SIGINT to stop the simulation cleanly.

# Basic single run
make picknplace-run

# Single run + record a KPI rosbag
make picknplace-record

Results land in monitoring_sessions/picknplace/<timestamp>/ and can be visualized immediately:

make visualize-last
make pipeline-graph

Benchmark (Multiple Runs)#

The benchmark target runs the simulation RUNS times (each up to PN_TIMEOUT seconds), pauses between runs, then aggregates KPI statistics.

# Default benchmark
make picknplace-benchmark

# Custom parameters
make picknplace-benchmark RUNS=5

# Re-aggregate KPIs from a completed benchmark directory
make analyze-benchmark BENCH=monitoring_sessions/picknplace/bench_20260319_164521

Parameter

Description

Default

RUNS

Number of simulation runs

25

PN_TIMEOUT

Max duration per run (seconds)

300

PAUSE

Pause between runs (seconds)

30

NODE

Narrow graph discovery to a specific node

—

Sessions are stored in monitoring_sessions/picknplace/.

What the Benchmark Script Does#

The picknplace-run script (src/picknplace_run.sh) automates:

  1. Launches ros2 launch picknplace warehouse.launch.py in the background.

  2. Waits 30 seconds for the simulation to stabilize.

  3. Starts make monitor-gpu DURATION=120 to capture GPU and resource metrics.

  4. After 120 seconds, sends SIGINT to stop the simulation and waits for both processes to exit cleanly.

Visualization#

# Timeline, resource, and frequency plots
make visualize-last

# Full GPU dashboard (engine busy%, frequency, power)
make visualize-gpu

# Interactive node topology graph
make pipeline-graph

For a specific session:

make visualize-last ALGORITHM=picknplace
make visualize-gpu SESSION=monitoring_sessions/picknplace/bench_20260319_164521

Troubleshooting#

Problem

Fix

Simulation fails to launch

Ensure picknplace-simulation package is installed (see Pick & Place tutorial)

No GPU data in results

Use GPU=1 flag or verify intel_gpu_top is installed on the target

Benchmark stops early

Increase PN_TIMEOUT — the full pick-and-place cycle can take up to 5 minutes

MoveIt2 instability

Run with CycloneDDS: RMW_IMPLEMENTATION=rmw_cyclonedds_cpp make picknplace-run

Session Data Layout#

monitoring_sessions/
└── picknplace/
    ├── bench_20260319_164521/        # benchmark run directory
    │   ├── 20260319_164521/          # individual run session
    │   │   ├── session_info.txt
    │   │   ├── graph_timing.csv
    │   │   ├── resource_usage.log
    │   │   ├── gpu_usage.log         # present when GPU=1
    │   │   └── visualizations/
    │   └── kpi_summary.txt           # aggregated KPIs across runs
    └── 20260319_183913/              # standalone single run
        └── ...