Cloud-based Motion Plan Computation for Power-Constrained Robots

We introduce a method for splitting the computation of a robot’s motion plan between the robot’s low-power embedded computer, and a high-performance cloud-based compute service. To meet the requirements of an interactive and dynamic scenario, robot motion planning may need more computing power than is available on robots designed for reduced weight and power consumption (e.g., battery powered mobile robots). In our method, the robot communicates its configuration, its goals, and the obstacles to the cloud-based service. The cloud-based service takes into account the latency and bandwidth of the connection between it and the robot and computes and returns a motion plan within the time frame necessary for the robot to meet requirements of a dynamic and interactive scenario. The cloud-based service parallelizes construction of a roadmap, and returns a sparse subset of the roadmap giving the robot the ability to adapt to changes between updates from the server. In our results, we show that with typical latency and bandwidth limitations, our method gains significant improvement in the responsiveness and quality of motion plans in interactive scenarios.