Towards Factory-Scale Edge Robotic Systems: Challenges and Research Directions

Mobile multi-robot systems are an integral component of highly automated factories of the future. Since mobile robots have limited on-board computing capability and battery capacity, there is increasing interest in exploring approaches that enable robots to effectively leverage wireless communications and Edge Computing solutions for perception, navigation, planning, coordination, and control. It is, however, a major challenge achieving precision, high-speed, co-ordinated actions between robots due to tight end-to-end latency, and safety requirements, especially while enabling time-sensitive data exchange over wireless networks and execution of computing workloads distributed across robots and the Edge system. The traditional approach of designing compute, communications, and control components in an Edge system as independent components, limits the capacity and scalability of computing and wireless resources and is therefore unsuitable to meet performance guarantees for energy and resource-efficient time-sensitive robotic applications. In this article, we discuss technical challenges in the context of two Edge Robotics use cases such as conveyer object pick-up and robot navigation, which are representative of time-critical control in IoT applications. We propose research directions grounded in an end-to-end system co-design paradigm and describe technology components such as virtualized robot functions, compute-communications-control co-design, Edge system co-simulation, safety and security aspects that are core to Edge Robotics. We also briefly outline future research directions that are necessary to pave the path toward factory-scale Edge Robotics systems.