Keeping it Local, Tiny and Real: Automated Report Generation on Edge Computing Devices for Mechatronic-Based Cognitive Systems

TL;DR

This paper presents a pipeline for generating natural language reports from multi-modal sensor data on edge devices, supporting privacy and real-time evaluation of mechatronic cognitive systems in diverse environments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel local, edge-based report generation pipeline for autonomous systems, enabling privacy-preserving and efficient analysis without external dependencies.

Findings

Effective report generation across indoor, outdoor, and urban environments.

Quantitative and qualitative evaluation results demonstrate system performance.

Publicly available supplementary materials support reproducibility.

Abstract

Recent advancements in Deep Learning enable hardware-based cognitive systems, that is, mechatronic systems in general and robotics in particular with integrated Artificial Intelligence, to interact with dynamic and unstructured environments. While the results are impressive, the application of such systems to critical tasks like autonomous driving as well as service and care robotics necessitate the evaluation of large amount of heterogeneous data. Automated report generation for Mobile Robotics can play a crucial role in facilitating the evaluation and acceptance of such systems in various domains. In this paper, we propose a pipeline for generating automated reports in natural language utilizing various multi-modal sensors that solely relies on local models capable of being deployed on edge computing devices, thus preserving the privacy of all actors involved and eliminating the need for external services. In particular, we evaluate our implementation on a diverse dataset spanning multiple domains including indoor, outdoor and urban environments, providing quantitative as well as qualitative evaluation results. Various generated example reports and other supplementary materials are available via a public repository.