Resource Management in MEC based Muti-Robot Cooperation Systems

Mobile edge computing (MEC) deployment in a multi-robot cooperation (MRC) system is an effective way to accomplish the tasks in terms of energy consumption and implementation latency. However, the computation and communication resources need to be considered jointly to fully exploit the advantages brought by the MEC technology. In this paper, the scenario where multi-robots cooperate to accomplish the time-critical tasks is studied, where an intelligent master robot (MR) acts as an edge server to provide services to multiple slave robots (SRs) and the SRs are responsible for the environment sensing and data collection. To save energy and prolong the function time of the system, a task assignment and resource management scheme is proposed to optimize the computation and communication resources. In the scheme, not only the energy consumption, but also the remaining energies of the SRs are considered to enhance the robustness of the system. Through the analysis and simulation results, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme effectively allocates tasks and resources, while the scheme has low computational complexity and robust to the unreliable wireless communication channels.