Avalon: Building an Operating System for Robotcenter

• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.1805.00745
• Publication Date: 2018-01-01
• Authors: Xu, Yuan; Yan, Zhiyuan; Wang, Sa; Yang, Cheng; Xiao, Qingsai; Bao, Yungang
• Keywords: FOS: Computer and information sciences; Computer Science - Robotics; 0209 industrial biotechnology; Computer Science - Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing; 02 engineering and technology; Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC); Robotics (cs.RO)

This paper envisions a scenario that hundreds of heterogeneous robots form a robotcenter which can be shared by multiple users and used like a single powerful robot to perform complex tasks. However, current multi-robot systems are either unable to manage heterogeneous robots or unable to support multiple concurrent users. Inspired by the design of modern datacenter OSes, we propose Avalon, a robot operating system with two-level scheduling scheme which is widely adopted in datacenters for Internet services and cloud computing. Specifically, Avalon integrates three important features together: (1) Instead of allocating a whole robot, Avalon classifies fine-grained robot resources into three categories to distinguish which fine-grained resources can be shared by multi-robot frameworks simultaneously. (2) Avalon adopts a location based resource allocation policy to substantially reduce scheduling overhead. (3) Avalon enables robots to offload computation intensive tasks to the clouds.We have implemented and evaluated Avalon on robots on both simulated environments and real world.