RoboBench: Towards sustainable robotics system benchmarking

Weisz, Jonathan; Huang, Yipeng; Lier, Florian; Sethumadhavan, Simha; Allen, Peter K.

doi:10.1109/icra.2016.7487514

Cited by 32 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Simulator + Benchmarks: RoboBench [71] provides a common platform around simulators and benchmarks using software containers to combat software compatibility problems across groups. This work is complementary to ours.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of Compute in Autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles: Optimizing for Mission Time and Energy Efficiency

Boroujerdian

Genç

Duisterhof

et al. 2021

ACM Trans. Comput. Syst.

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Autonomous and mobile cyber-physical machines are becoming an inevitable part of our future. In particular, Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) have seen a resurgence in activity. With multiple use cases, such as surveillance, search and rescue, package delivery, and more, these unmanned aerial systems are on the cusp of demonstrating their full potential. Despite such promises, these systems face many challenges, one of the most prominent of which is their low endurance caused by their limited onboard energy. Since the success of a mission depends on whether the drone can finish it within such duration and before it runs out of battery, improving both the time and energy associated with the mission are of high importance. Such improvements have traditionally arrived at through the use of better algorithms. But our premise is that more powerful and efficient onboard compute can also address the problem. In this paper, we investigate how the compute subsystem, in a cyber-physical mobile machine, such as a Micro Aerial Vehicle, can impact mission time (time to complete a mission) and energy. Specifically, we pose the question as what is the role of computing for cyber-physical mobile robots? We show that compute and motion are tightly intertwined, and as such a close examination of cyber and physical processes and their impact on one another is necessary. We show different “impact paths” through which compute impacts mission metrics and examine them using a combination of analytical models, simulation, micro and end-to-end benchmarking. To enable similar studies, we open sourced MAVBench , our tool-set, which consists of (1) a closed-loop real-time feedback simulator and (2) an end-to-end benchmark suite comprised of state-of-the-art kernels. By combining MAVBench, analytical modeling, and an understanding of various compute impacts, we show up to 2X and 1.8X improvements for mission time and mission energy for two optimization case studies. Our investigations, as well as our optimizations, show that cyber-physical co-design, a methodology with which both the cyber and physical processes/quantities of the robot are developed with consideration of one another, similar to hardware-software co-design, is necessary for arriving at the design of the optimal robot.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of Compute in Autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles: Optimizing for Mission Time and Energy Efficiency

Boroujerdian

Genç

Duisterhof

et al. 2021

ACM Trans. Comput. Syst.

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“…The approach uses containerization in an automated build and deployment process for simulation environments. An extension to the CITk is the RoboBench project presented by Weisz et al [12] that extends the CITk by a benchmarking suite that allows the distribution of system-wide benchmarking containers via public repositories. Unfortunately, the initial approach as well as the extension do not support physical robots.…”

Section: B Containerization In Multi-robot Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

SwarmRob: A Docker-Based Toolkit for Reproducibility and Sharing of Experimental Artifacts in Robotics Research

Prtner¹,

Hoffmann²,

Zug³

et al. 2018

2018 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC)

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Due to the complexity of robotics, the reproducibility of results and experiments is one of the fundamental problems in robotics research. While the problem has been identified by the community, the approaches that address the problem appropriately are limited. The toolkit proposed in this paper tries to deal with the problem of reproducibility and sharing of experimental artifacts in robotics research by a holistic approach based on operating-system-level virtualization. The experimental artifacts of an experiment are isolated in "containers" that can be distributed to other researchers. Based on this, this paper presents a novel experimental workflow to describe, execute and distribute experimental software-artifacts to heterogeneous robots dynamically. As a result, the proposed solution supports researchers in executing and reproducing experimental evaluations.

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“…Motivated by bio-inspired robotics, this paper considers challenges related to sustainable robotics [ 22 ]. In particular to design and construct an aerial robot that can perform some kind of robotic-life-cycle rather than dedicated predefined tasks.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Vision-Less Sensing for Autonomous Micro-Drones

Pikalov

Azaria

Sonnenberg

et al. 2021

Sensors

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This work presents a concept of intelligent vision-less micro-drones, which are motivated by flying animals such as insects, birds, and bats. The presented micro-drone (named BAT: Blind Autonomous Tiny-drone) can perform bio-inspired complex tasks without the use of cameras. The BAT uses LIDARs and self-emitted optical-flow in order to perform obstacle avoiding and maze-solving. The controlling algorithms were implemented on an onboard micro-controller, allowing the BAT to be fully autonomous. We further present a method for using the information collected by the drone to generate a detailed mapping of the environment. A complete model of the BAT was implemented and tested using several scenarios both in simulation and field experiments, in which it was able to explore and map complex building autonomously even in total darkness.

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RoboBench: Towards sustainable robotics system benchmarking

Cited by 32 publications

References 13 publications

The Role of Compute in Autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles: Optimizing for Mission Time and Energy Efficiency

The Role of Compute in Autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles: Optimizing for Mission Time and Energy Efficiency

SwarmRob: A Docker-Based Toolkit for Reproducibility and Sharing of Experimental Artifacts in Robotics Research

Vision-Less Sensing for Autonomous Micro-Drones

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