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The growing demand of industrial, automotive and service robots presents a challenge to the centralized Cloud Robotics model in terms of privacy, security, latency, bandwidth, and reliability. In this paper, we present a `Fog Robotics approach to deep robot learning that distributes compute, storage and networking resources between the Cloud and the Edge in a federated manner. Deep models are trained on non-private (public) synthetic images in the Cloud; the models are adapted to the private real images of the environment at the Edge within a trusted network and subsequently, deployed as a service for low-latency and secure inference/prediction for other robots in the network. We apply this approach to surface decluttering, where a mobile robot picks and sorts objects from a cluttered floor by learning a deep object recognition and a grasp planning model. Experiments suggest that Fog Robotics can improve performance by sim-to-real domain adaptation in comparison to exclusively using Cloud or Edge resources, while reducing the inference cycle time by 4times to successfully declutter 86% of objects over 213 attempts.
Active communication between robots and humans is essential for effective human-robot interaction. To accomplish this objective, Cloud Robotics (CR) was introduced to make robots enhance their capabilities. It enables robots to perform extensive computations in the cloud by sharing their outcomes. Outcomes include maps, images, processing power, data, activities, and other robot resources. But due to the colossal growth of data and traffic, CR suffers from serious latency issues. Therefore, it is unlikely to scale a large number of robots particularly in human-robot interaction scenarios, where responsiveness is paramount. Furthermore, other issues related to security such as privacy breaches and ransomware attacks can increase. To address these problems, in this paper, we have envisioned the next generation of social robotic architectures based on Fog Robotics (FR) that inherits the strengths of Fog Computing to augment the future social robotic systems. These new architectures can escalate the dexterity of robots by shoving the data closer to the robot. Additionally, they can ensure that human-robot interaction is more responsive by resolving the problems of CR. Moreover, experimental results are further discussed by considering a scenario of FR and latency as a primary factor comparing to CR models.
This work investigates uncertainty-aware deep learning (DL) in tactile robotics based on a general framework introduced recently for robot vision. For a test scenario, we consider optical tactile sensing in combination with DL to estimate the edge pose as a feedback signal to servo around various 2D test objects. We demonstrate that uncertainty-aware DL can improve the pose estimation over deterministic DL methods. The system estimates the uncertainty associated with each prediction, which is used along with temporal coherency to improve the predictions via a Kalman filter, and hence improve the tactile servo control. The robot is able to robustly follow all of the presented contour shapes to reduce not only the error by a factor of two but also smooth the trajectory from the undesired noisy behaviour caused by previous deterministic networks. In our view, as the field of tactile robotics matures in its use of DL, the estimation of uncertainty will become a key component in the control of physically interactive tasks in complex environments.
Artificial touch would seem well-suited for Reinforcement Learning (RL), since both paradigms rely on interaction with an environment. Here we propose a new environment and set of tasks to encourage development of tactile reinforcement learning: learning to type on a braille keyboard. Four tasks are proposed, progressing in difficulty from arrow to alphabet keys and from discrete to continuous actions. A simulated counterpart is also constructed by sampling tactile data from the physical environment. Using state-of-the-art deep RL algorithms, we show that all of these tasks can be successfully learnt in simulation, and 3 out of 4 tasks can be learned on the real robot. A lack of sample efficiency currently makes the continuous alphabet task impractical on the robot. To the best of our knowledge, this work presents the first demonstration of successfully training deep RL agents in the real world using observations that exclusively consist of tactile images. To aid future research utilising this environment, the code for this project has been released along with designs of the braille keycaps for 3D printing and a guide for recreating the experiments. A brief video summary is also available at https://youtu.be/eNylCA2uE_E.
Human-robot interaction plays a crucial role to make robots closer to humans. Usually, robots are limited by their own capabilities. Therefore, they utilise Cloud Robotics to enhance their dexterity. Its ability includes the sharing of information such as maps, images and the processing power. This whole process involves distributing data which intend to rise enormously. New issues can arise such as bandwidth, network congestion at backhaul and fronthaul systems resulting in high latency. Thus, it can make an impact on seamless connectivity between the robots, users and the cloud. Also, a robot may not accomplish its goal successfully within a stipulated time. As a consequence, Cloud Robotics cannot be in a position to handle the traffic imposed by robots. On the contrary, impending Fog Robotics can act as a solution by solving major problems of Cloud Robotics. Therefore to check its feasibility, we discuss the need and architectures of Fog Robotics in this paper. To evaluate the architectures, we used a realistic scenario of Fog Robotics by comparing them with Cloud Robotics. Next, latency is chosen as the primary factor for validating the effectiveness of the system. Besides, we utilised real-time latency using Pepper robot, Fog robot server and the Cloud server. Experimental results show that Fog Robotics reduces latency significantly compared to Cloud Robotics. Moreover, advantages, challenges and future scope of the Fog Robotics system is further discussed.
PyRep is a toolkit for robot learning research, built on top of the virtual robotics experimentation platform (V-REP). Through a series of modifications and additions, we have created a tailored version of V-REP built with robot learning in mind. The new PyRep toolkit offers three improvements: (1) a simple and flexible API for robot control and scene manipulation, (2) a new rendering engine, and (3) speed boosts upwards of 10,000x in comparison to the previous Python Remote API. With these improvements, we believe PyRep is the ideal toolkit to facilitate rapid prototyping of learning algorithms in the areas of reinforcement learning, imitation learning, state estimation, mapping, and computer vision.