OROS: Online Operation and Orchestration of Collaborative Robots using 5G

TL;DR

This paper introduces OROS, a novel 5G-enabled orchestration framework that optimizes navigation, sensing, and resource use in collaborative robots to reduce mission time and energy consumption in outdoor exploration.

Contribution

The paper presents OROS, a new approach that jointly optimizes robot operations and 5G infrastructure to enhance energy efficiency and reduce mission completion time.

Findings

Improved exploration efficiency by up to 11.98% using 5G orchestration.

Energy savings achieved through joint optimization of navigation and sensing.

Validated framework with simulation tools like Matlab/Simulink, ROS, and Gazebo.

Abstract

The 5G mobile networks extend the capability for supporting collaborative robot operations in outdoor scenarios. However, the restricted battery life of robots still poses a major obstacle to their effective implementation and utilization in real scenarios. One of the most challenging situations is the execution of mission-critical tasks that require the use of various onboard sensors to perform simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) of unexplored environments. Given the time-sensitive nature of these tasks, completing them in the shortest possible time is of the highest importance. In this paper, we analyze the benefits of 5G-enabled collaborative robots by enhancing the intelligence of the robot operation through joint orchestration of Robot Operating System (ROS) and 5G resources for energysaving goals, addressing the problem from both offline and online manners. We propose OROS, a novel orchestration approach that minimizes mission-critical task completion times as well as overall energy consumption of 5G-connected robots by jointly optimizing robotic navigation and sensing together with infrastructure resources. We validate our 5G-enabled collaborative framework by means of Matlab/Simulink, ROS software and Gazebo simulator. Our results show an improvement between 3.65% and 11.98% in exploration task by exploiting 5G orchestration features for battery savings when using 3 robots.