RoboEC2: A Novel Cloud Robotic System With Dynamic Network Offloading Assisted by Amazon EC2

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are increasingly utilized in robotic tasks. However, resource-constrained mobile robots often do not have sufficient onboard computing resources or power reserves to run the most accurate and state-of-the-art DNNs. Cloud robotics has the benefit of enabling robots to offload DNNs to cloud servers, which is considered a promising technology to address the issue. However, comprehensive issues exist, including flexibility, convenience, offloading policy, and especially network robustness in its implementations and deployments. Although it is essential to promote cloud robotics to be practical, a cloud robotic system that addresses these issues comprehensively has never been proposed. Accordingly, in this work, we present RoboEC2, a novel cloud robotic system with dynamic network offloading implemented assisted by Amazon EC2. To realize the goal, we present a cloud-edge cooperation framework based on ROS and Amazon Web Services (AWS) and a network offloading approach with a dynamic splitting way. RoboEC2 is capable of executing its network offloading program in any conditions, including disconnected. We model the DNN offloading problem in RoboEC2 to a specific multi-objective optimization problem and address it by proposing the Spotlight Criteria Algorithm (SCA). RoboEC2 is flexible, convenient, and robust. It is the first cloud robotic system with no constraints on time, location, or computing power. Finally, We demonstrate RoboEC2 with analyses and experiments that it performs better in comprehensive metrics compared with the state-of-the-art approach. We open-source the system at https://github.com/RoboEC2/RoboEC2. Note to Practitioners—RoboEC2 is a work that combines cloud computing and robotics. As the deep learning models are becoming larger, robots are becoming more and more difficult to run the state-of-the-art models locally. It has become one of the major problems in robotics. RoboEC2 was proposed to address this problem. It enables more robotics researchers to equip their robots with the power of cloud computing. To be honest, it is very difficult for us to complete this work that is a robotic system with cloud computing. We need to address a lot of difficulties such as network, the cloud platform, algorithms, robot platforms, and conduct various robotic tasks. We have spent more than one year on this system and overcome countless difficulties to complete it. All of what we do is to make robotics developer easier strengthen their robots with cloud. Whether you are an autonomous driving engineer, robotic arm developer, SLAM researcher, mobile robotics researcher, or any other developer working on robotics applications based on ROS and deep learning models, you can use RoboEC2 to make them perform better. You don’t need to worry about networking, because RoboEC2 has solved it perfectly. You don’t need to worry about the serious algorithms in the system, because we provide easily used interact files for you to configure. You just need to tell RoboEC2 which metrics your robotics application needs to focus on. With RoboEC2, all the robotic researchers/developers are capable of enhancing their robotic applications with cloud computing in just a few simple steps and executing them in any network conditions. So, why not?

I. Introduction

Deep learning models have been demonstrated to achieve superior performance in various robotics tasks, particularly in the areas of perception and decision-making. However, the use of these models can significantly increase the computational requirements and energy consumption of robots, leading to challenges in terms of endurance and resource constraints for autonomous mobile robots such as self-driving cars, delivery drones, and autonomous logistics vehicles. This issue, known as the compute-and-power-limited problem in mobile robotics, presents a significant challenge for the widespread adoption of robots.