Enabling Remote Whole-Body Control with 5G Edge Computing
Real-world applications require light-weight, energy-efficient, fully autonomous robots. Yet, increasing auton- omy is oftentimes synonymous with escalating computational requirements. It might thus be desirable to offload intensive computation—not only sensing and planning, but also low- level whole-body control—to remote servers in order to reduce on-board computational needs. Fifth Generation (5G) wireless cellular technology, with its low latency and high bandwidth capabilities, has the potential to unlock cloud-based high per- formance control of complex robots. However, state-of-the-art control algorithms for legged robots can only tolerate very low control delays, which even ultra-low latency 5G edge computing can sometimes fail to achieve. In this work, we investigate the problem of cloud-based whole-body control of legged robots over a 5G link. We propose a novel approach that consists of a standard optimization-based controller on the network edge and a local linear, approximately optimal controller that significantly reduces on-board computational needs while increasing robustness to delay and possible loss of commu- nication. Simulation experiments on humanoid balancing and walking tasks that includes a realistic 5G communication model demonstrate significant improvement of the reliability of robot locomotion under jitter and delays likely to be experienced in 5G wireless links.
| Author(s): | Huaijiang Zhu and Manali Sharma and Kai Pfeiffer and Marco Mezzavilla and Jia Shen and Sundeep Rangan and Ludovic Righetti |
| Book Title: | IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) |
| Pages: | 3553-3560 |
| Year: | 2020 |
| Month: | October |
| Day: | 24 |
| Publisher: | IEEE |
| Bibtex Type: | Conference Paper (conference) |
| Address: | Piscataway, NJ, USA |
| DOI: | 10.1109/IROS45743.2020.9341113 |
| Event Name: | IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) |
| Event Place: | Las Vegas |
| State: | Accepted |
| URL: | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9341113 |
| Digital: | True |
| Electronic Archiving: | grant_archive |
BibTex
@conference{Zhu2020enabling,
title = {Enabling Remote Whole-Body Control with 5G Edge Computing},
booktitle = {IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)},
abstract = {Real-world applications require light-weight, energy-efficient, fully autonomous robots. Yet, increasing auton- omy is oftentimes synonymous with escalating computational requirements. It might thus be desirable to offload intensive computation—not only sensing and planning, but also low- level whole-body control—to remote servers in order to reduce on-board computational needs. Fifth Generation (5G) wireless cellular technology, with its low latency and high bandwidth capabilities, has the potential to unlock cloud-based high per- formance control of complex robots. However, state-of-the-art control algorithms for legged robots can only tolerate very low control delays, which even ultra-low latency 5G edge computing can sometimes fail to achieve. In this work, we investigate the problem of cloud-based whole-body control of legged robots over a 5G link. We propose a novel approach that consists of a standard optimization-based controller on the network edge and a local linear, approximately optimal controller that significantly reduces on-board computational needs while increasing robustness to delay and possible loss of commu- nication. Simulation experiments on humanoid balancing and walking tasks that includes a realistic 5G communication model demonstrate significant improvement of the reliability of robot locomotion under jitter and delays likely to be experienced in 5G wireless links.},
pages = {3553-3560},
publisher = {IEEE},
address = {Piscataway, NJ, USA},
month = oct,
year = {2020},
slug = {zhu2020enabling},
author = {Zhu, Huaijiang and Sharma, Manali and Pfeiffer, Kai and Mezzavilla, Marco and Shen, Jia and Rangan, Sundeep and Righetti, Ludovic},
url = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9341113},
month_numeric = {10}
}