Safety-based Dynamic Task Offloading for Human-Robot Collaboration using Deep Reinforcement Learning

Robots with constrained hardware resources usually rely on Multi-access Edge Computing infrastructures to offload computationally expensive tasks to meet real-time and safety requirements. Offloading every task might not be the best option due to dynamic changes in the network conditions and can result in network congestion or failures. This work proposes a task offloading strategy for mobile robots in a Human-Robot Collaboration scenario that optimizes the edge resource usage and reduces network delays, leading to safety enhancement. The solution utilizes a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) agent that observes safety and network metrics to dynamically decide at runtime if (i) a less accurate model should run on the robot; (ii) a more complex model should run on the edge; or (iii) the previous output should be reused through temporal coherence verification. Experiments are performed in a simulated warehouse where humans and robots have close interactions and safety needs are high. Our results show that the proposed DRL solution outperforms the baselines in several aspects. The edge is used only when the network performance is reliable, reducing the number of failures (up to 47 %). The latency is not only decreased (up to 68 %) but also adapted to the safety requirements (risk × latency reduced up to 48 %), avoiding unnecessary network congestion in safe situations and letting other devices use the network. Overall, the safety metrics get improved, such as the increased time in the safe zone by up to 3.1%.