Energy-aware Joint Orchestration of 5G and Robots: Experimental Testbed and Field Validation

5G mobile networks introduce a new dimension for connecting and operating mobile robots in outdoor environments, leveraging cloud-native and offloading features of 5G networks to enable fully flexible and collaborative cloud robot operations. However, the limited battery life of robots remains a significant obstacle to their effective adoption in real-world exploration scenarios. This paper explores, via field experiments, the potential energy-saving gains of OROS, a joint orchestration of 5G and Robot Operating System (ROS) that coordinates multiple 5G-connected robots both in terms of navigation and sensing, as well as optimizes their cloud-native service resource utilization while minimizing total resource and energy consumption on the robots based on real-time feedback. We designed, implemented, and evaluated our proposed OROS in an experimental testbed composed of commercial off-the-shelf robots and a local 5G infrastructure deployed on a campus. The experimental results demonstrated that OROS significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of energy savings by offloading demanding computational tasks to the 5G edge infrastructure and dynamic energy management of on-board sensors (e.g., switching them off when they are not needed). This strategy achieves approximately ∼ 15% energy savings on the robots, thereby extending battery life, which in turn allows for longer operating times and better resource utilization.

Citation

Groshev, Milan, Luca Zanzi, Carlos Delgado, Xinyu Li, Antonio de la Oliva, and Xavier Costa-Pérez. “Energy-Aware Joint Orchestration of 5G and Robots: Experimental Testbed and Field Validation.” IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, 2025, doi:10.1109/TNSM.2025.3555126.

Authors from IE Research Datalab