Creating advanced tools for smart robot swarms
Since its launch in January 2023, the EU-funded SMARTEDGE(opens in new window) project has been creating tools and methods that facilitate the development of edge intelligence solutions for real-world scenarios. Taking advantage of edge computing and the Internet of things to tackle challenges and optimise processes, the project is testing these methods and tools in smart factories, health monitoring, road intersection safety, manufacturing innovation and driving assistance. One of these tools is smart swarm networks currently being developed in a lab at SMARTEDGE project coordinator National Inter-University Consortium for Telecommunications in Italy. At the lab, which emulates a factory floor at Dell Technologies, lead researcher Filippo Cugini and his colleagues are testing their software and hardware on three networked robots. The aim is to form and control a robot swarm using edge intelligence. “We’re reproducing an operational area of the factory floor so we can understand exactly what happens to these autonomous robots,” explains Cugini in a news item(opens in new window) published on ‘EE Times Europe’. “For example, we can walk through the lab, and the robots’ cameras will recognize there’s a person there as an obstacle and immediately stop.” The researcher goes on to explain that such factory settings require strong security and dynamic networking capabilities. “We also need to make sure that a robot claiming to be a certain robot is exactly that robot,” Cugini adds. “There are many issues.” This work is the networking component of SMARTEDGE’s research into the development of autonomous mobile robot swarms that can communicate and collaborate on the edge. Other areas of research include a low-code engineering toolchain for edge intelligence developed by project partners Siemens, Dell Technologies and Technische Universität Berlin, and advanced computer vision developed by project partner Bosch. Another partner, Nvidia, has contributed to the project its BlueField-2 smart network interface card, a hardware accelerator.
Better communication, low latency
Cugini and his team have also developed a software layer that manages communications between robots, performing security validation and preventing messages from being intercepted. Latency limitations were taken into account during development: “After a couple years of working on this, we can say that this thin software layer doesn’t really add a lot of extra latency [to swarm networking], and the swarm can adapt to network changes in much less than 1 second,” Cugini notes, adding: “The extra latency that we added to enable this additional security and dynamicity—and, in total, the networking capability—strongly depends on the underlying hardware. If we use a simple Raspberry Pi that costs a few tens of euros, performance is on par with a home Wi-Fi network, but if we have a powerful Nvidia data processing unit, we’ve got a super-fast 100 gigabits per second or more.” Experiments have only been conducted with up to 20 autonomous robots in a swarm, but – as reported in the news item – in simulations there can be 1 000. “We’ll never have 1,000 devices joining and leaving simultaneously on a factory floor, but we’re also considering swarms of cars in the project’s automotive use case,” Cugini explains. For this case, the SMARTEDGE (Semantic Low-code Programming Tools for Edge Intelligence) team ultimately aims to include around 1 000 autonomous vehicles in the combined practical and simulation studies. For more information, please see: SMARTEDGE project website(opens in new window)