Serverless Multi-Query Motion Planning for Fog Robotics

Robots in semi-structured environments such as homes and warehouses sporadically require computation of high-dimensional motion plans. Cloud and fog-based parallelization of motion planning can speed up planning. This can be further made efficient by the use of "serverless" on-demand computing as opposed to always-on high end computers. This paper explores parallelizing the computation of a sampling-based multi-query motion planner based on asymptotically-optimal Probabilistic Road Maps (PRM*) using the simultaneous execution of 100s of cloud-based serverless functions. We propose an algorithm to overcome the communication and bandwidth limitations of serverless computing and use different work-sharing techniques to further optimize the cost and run time. Additionally, we provide proofs of probabilistic completeness and asymptotic optimality. In experiments on synthetic benchmarks and on a physical Fetch robot performing a sequence of decluttering motions, we observe up to a 50x speedup relative to a 4 core edge computer with only a marginally higher cost.