OROS: Orchestrating ROS-driven Collaborative Connected Robots in Mission-Critical Operations

Battery life for collaborative robotics scenarios is a key challenge limiting operational uses and deployment in real life. Mission-Critical tasks are among the most relevant and challenging scenarios. As multiple and heterogeneous on-board sensors are required to explore unknown environments in simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) tasks, battery life problems are further exacerbated. Given the time-sensitivity of mission-critical operations, the successful completion of specific tasks in the minimum amount of time is of paramount importance. In this paper, we analyze the benefits of 5G-enabled collaborative robots by enhancing the Robot Operating System (ROS) capabilities with network orchestration features for energy-saving purposes. We propose OROS, a novel orchestration approach that minimizes mission-critical task completion times of 5G-connected robots by jointly optimizing robotic navigation and sensing together with infrastructure resources. Our results show that OROS significantly outperforms state-of-the-art solutions in exploration tasks completion times by exploiting 5G orchestration features for battery life extension.

I. Introduction

Robots have been designed to interact with unknown environments and act on behalf of humans to minimize the risk of accidents or injuries. Thanks to their rapid deployment and relatively low cost, ground robots as well as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have recently emerged as alternatives to address emergency and mission-critical scenarios [1] [2]. Such use-cases drive the evolution of simple remote-controlled robots into moving platforms equipped with dedicated operating systems, advanced computing capabilities and multiple communication modules, to support autonomous navigation and robot control tasks, which can be also aided by Artificial Intelligence (AI) based solutions to perform more accurate decisions thanks to real-time multi-sensor data streams.