OpenBot-Fleet: A System for Collective Learning with Real Robots

TL;DR

OpenBot-Fleet is an open-source cloud robotics system that enables large-scale, cost-effective collective learning of navigation policies using smartphone-equipped robots operated by crowd workers, demonstrating high success in unseen environments.

Contribution

It introduces a scalable, low-cost cloud robotics platform that facilitates collective learning and deployment of navigation policies across a robot fleet in real-world settings.

Findings

Achieved over 80% success rate in unseen homes

Distributed 72 robots for real-world data collection

Demonstrated scalable, cost-effective fleet learning

Abstract

We introduce OpenBot-Fleet, a comprehensive open-source cloud robotics system for navigation. OpenBot-Fleet uses smartphones for sensing, local compute and communication, Google Firebase for secure cloud storage and off-board compute, and a robust yet low-cost wheeled robot toact in real-world environments. The robots collect task data and upload it to the cloud where navigation policies can be learned either offline or online and can then be sent back to the robot fleet. In our experiments we distribute 72 robots to a crowd of workers who operate them in homes, and show that OpenBot-Fleet can learn robust navigation policies that generalize to unseen homes with >80% success rate. OpenBot-Fleet represents a significant step forward in cloud robotics, making it possible to deploy large continually learning robot fleets in a cost-effective and scalable manner. All materials can be found at https://www.openbot.org. A video is available at https://youtu.be/wiv2oaDgDi8