Energy-aware Joint Orchestration of 5G and Robots: Experimental Testbed and Field Validation

2025-03-25

AI Summary

To address the short battery life and low energy efficiency of outdoor mobile robots in 5G environments, this paper proposes OROS—a joint energy-aware orchestration framework integrating 5G networks with ROS 2. The core contribution is a novel 5G-Robot collaborative energy-aware scheduling mechanism: it dynamically deactivates redundant sensors and offloads compute-intensive tasks to edge nodes based on real-time energy consumption feedback. Leveraging 5G standalone (SA) network slicing, ROS 2’s distributed communication architecture, online energy modeling, and dynamic resource scheduling algorithms, OROS jointly optimizes robot navigation, perception, and cloud-native services. Evaluated on a real-world campus 5G testbed, the framework reduces on-robot energy consumption by approximately 15%, significantly extends single-charge operational duration, and improves edge resource utilization.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Learning & Optimization for ROB
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Computer Vision: Vision for Robotics & Autonomous Driving

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Efficiency and scalability of Web search engines
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs

Abstract

5G mobile networks introduce a new dimension for connecting and operating mobile robots in outdoor environments, leveraging cloud-native and offloading features of 5G networks to enable fully flexible and collaborative cloud robot operations. However, the limited battery life of robots remains a significant obstacle to their effective adoption in real-world exploration scenarios. This paper explores, via field experiments, the potential energy-saving gains of OROS, a joint orchestration of 5G and Robot Operating System (ROS) that coordinates multiple 5G-connected robots both in terms of navigation and sensing, as well as optimizes their cloud-native service resource utilization while minimizing total resource and energy consumption on the robots based on real-time feedback. We designed, implemented and evaluated our proposed OROS in an experimental testbed composed of commercial off-the-shelf robots and a local 5G infrastructure deployed on a campus. The experimental results demonstrated that OROS significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of energy savings by offloading demanding computational tasks to the 5G edge infrastructure and dynamic energy management of on-board sensors (e.g., switching them off when they are not needed). This strategy achieves approximately 15% energy savings on the robots, thereby extending battery life, which in turn allows for longer operating times and better resource utilization.

Problem

• Optimizing energy use in 5G-connected robots via joint orchestration.
• Reducing robot battery drain through cloud-native task offloading.
• Enhancing robot operation time with dynamic sensor management.

Innovation

• 5G-ROS joint orchestration for energy efficiency
• Dynamic offloading to 5G edge infrastructure
• Real-time sensor and resource optimization