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

TL;DR

This work tackles energy-constrained outdoor multi-robot exploration under 5G connectivity by proposing OROS, a joint ROS-based robot orchestration and 5G resource orchestration framework. It formulates an energy-aware MILP that maximizes area exploration while balancing battery state, and it provides both offline and online variants, including a real-time windowed optimization with feedback updates. The approach is validated in a Gazebo/ROS simulation with a 5G NR link and MATLAB/Simulink real-time orchestration, showing up to 11.98% exploration gains and meaningful energy savings over baselines, and revealing insights into the impact of obstacles, battery capacity, and window size on performance. The results demonstrate the potential of tightly integrated robot and network orchestration to extend operation time and speed autonomous outdoor missions, paving the way for real deployments on edge/cloud-enabled fleets.

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.

Figures (11)

• Figure 1: Overview of the architectural building blocks.
• Figure 2: Architecture overview of the OROS solution.
• Figure 3: Example of robot exploration task solved with multiple robots.
• Figure 4: Example of robot exploration problem solved with the state-of-the-art Offline (top) vs. proposed Online approach (bottom).
• Figure 5: Robot software components and non-linear battery discharge example.