Collaborative Robot Transport System Based on Edge Computing

Collaboration between heterogeneous robots promises increased robustness and efficiency of tasks with great potential in applications, such as manufacturing, search and rescue. In this paper, we present a collaboration system based on an edge computing framework, a mobile robot named “StellaX” and a manipulator. The robot StellaX is assembled by a three-wheel omnidirectional platform, a LIDAR scanner for indoor autonomous navigation, and a stereo camera which can capture objects' images. The information of objects, which can be used for grasping, is stored and shared with the manipulator through the edge computing framework with Docker and ROS. Finally, we test the collaboration system by conducting an object recognition experiment and a navigation experiment. The experimental results demonstrate the system effectiveness and prove that the system yields better real-time performance and reduces total task execution time than a cloud computing-based scenario.