Time-Critical Tasks Implementation in MEC based Multi-Robot Cooperation\n Systems

Abstract

Mobile edge computing (MEC) deployment in a multi-robot cooperation (MRC)\nsystem is an effective way to accomplish the tasks in terms of energy\nconsumption and implementation latency. However, the computation and\ncommunication resources need to be considered jointly to fully exploit the\nadvantages brought by the MEC technology. In this paper, the scenario where\nmulti robots cooperate to accomplish the time-critical tasks is studied, where\nan intelligent master robot (MR) acts as an edge server to provide services to\nmultiple slave robots (SRs) and the SRs are responsible for the environment\nsensing and data collection. To save energy and prolong the function time of\nthe system, two schemes are proposed to optimize the computation and\ncommunication resources, respectively. In the first scheme, the energy\nconsumption of SRs is minimized and balanced while guaranteeing that the tasks\nare accomplished under a time constraint. In the second scheme, not only the\nenergy consumption, but also the remaining energies of the SRs are considered\nto enhance the robustness of the system. Through the analysis and numerical\nsimulations, we demonstrate that even though the first policy may guarantee the\nminimization on the total SRs' energy consumption, the function time of MRC\nsystem by the second scheme is longer than that by the first one.\n