5G wireless to connect robots on the ground to AI in the cloud

A research team at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, with the support of the National Science Foundation's National Robotics Initiative 2.0, is building the foundations of a wireless system that takes advantage of superfast fifth-generation (5G) wireless communications to outsource a mobile robots' artificial intelligence (AI) functions to the edge cloud--the server in the cloud closest to the robot. The collaborators, all of whom are members of the faculty of NYU Tandon's renowned NYU WIRELESS center for telecommunications research, will design manipulation and locomotion algorithms that address some important technical hurdles to making 5G networks a viable bridge between robot and server. Shifting AI capabilities from the robot to a remote server offers tantalizing operational benefits, such as allowing robots to perceive the environment, perform complex operations, and make decisions autonomously, all without incurring major energy and weight costs from onboard computational and power-generation equipment. Comprising Ludovic Righetti, professor in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering; and Siddharth Garg, Sundeep Rangan and Elza Erkip, professors in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the team will focus on solving issues of reliability, safety of robotic operation under communication degradation, and scalability to multi-robot systems. The collaboration brings expertise in robotics (Righetti), computer architecture and computation (Garg), wireless networks (Rangan and Erkip), and information theory (Erkip).