Time-Critical Tasks Implementation in MEC based Multi-Robot Cooperation Systems

TL;DR

This paper explores how mobile edge computing can optimize multi-robot cooperation for time-critical tasks by proposing energy-efficient schemes that balance resource use and system robustness, validated through analysis and simulations.

Contribution

It introduces two novel resource optimization schemes for MEC-based multi-robot systems, considering energy consumption, task deadlines, and system robustness.

Findings

The second scheme extends system operation time compared to the first.

Energy balancing reduces overall energy consumption of slave robots.

Numerical simulations validate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes.

Abstract

Mobile edge computing (MEC) deployment in a multi-robot cooperation (MRC) system is an effective way to accomplish the tasks in terms of energy consumption and implementation latency. However, the computation and communication resources need to be considered jointly to fully exploit the advantages brought by the MEC technology. In this paper, the scenario where multi robots cooperate to accomplish the time-critical tasks is studied, where an intelligent master robot (MR) acts as an edge server to provide services to multiple slave robots (SRs) and the SRs are responsible for the environment sensing and data collection. To save energy and prolong the function time of the system, two schemes are proposed to optimize the computation and communication resources, respectively. In the first scheme, the energy consumption of SRs is minimized and balanced while guaranteeing that the tasks are accomplished under a time constraint. In the second scheme, not only the energy consumption, but also the remaining energies of the SRs are considered to enhance the robustness of the system. Through the analysis and numerical simulations, we demonstrate that even though the first policy may guarantee the minimization on the total SRs' energy consumption, the function time of MRC system by the second scheme is longer than that by the first one.