I believe that at least the initial version of ISAAC from Nvidia was based on an ECS. I don't think it is a determinism killer, this is often a well ordered pipeline within a game loop.

In terms of architecture though, it looks like it makes a ton of sense inside something like a tracker (ie the entity is basically a track) but for other parts like a vision pipeline, sensor fusion etc... I don't see how it helps.

Tell me if I am missing something.

Talking about Bevy, fitting Copper within Bevy to build this little simulation example happened super naturally: Copper is a System querying the Entities within the virtual world after each simulation tick.

Indeed thanks. "Not unlike" :)

Exactly.

Technically Copper is a compiler taking your graph with those constraints in mind and building a game loop out of it.

Note that Copper can be distributed too, we do support iceoryx2 for example if you need to split it in 2 or more processes.

We have ~100x less latency and ~12x faster logging also because we have adopted a data oriented architecture: the tasks outputs are written back to back in memory, all the IOs are linear (we could log to a block device straight, we don't even need a filesystem). I am not sure it is possible to touch this with ROS just because of its "everything is asynchronous" design pattern.

So the question is more about those limits in practical applications: do you have use cases where you absolutely need every single component deployed as a kind of micro service in a robot?

Oh wow thanks, I have to tell you something... It is really hard to explain what a piece of middleware is and why it is important :)