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Mobility, power, and price points often dictate that robots do not have sufficient computing power on board to run contemporary robot algorithms at desired rates. Cloud computing providers such as AWS, GCP, and Azure offer immense computing power on demand, but tapping into that power from a robot is non-trivial. We present FogROS2, an open-source platform to facilitate cloud and fog robotics that is compatible with the emerging Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2) standard. FogROS2 is completely redesigned and distinct from its predecessor FogROS1 in 9 ways, and has lower latency, overhead, and startup times; improved usability, and additional automa-tion, such as region and computer type selection. Additionally, FogROS2 was added to the official distribution of ROS 2, gaining performance, timing, and additional improvements associated with ROS 2. In examples, FogROS2 reduces SLAM latency by 50 %, reduces grasp planning time from 14 s to 1.2 s, and speeds up motion planning 28x. When compared to FogROS1, FogROS2 reduces network utilization by up to 3.8x, improves startup time by 63 %, and network round-trip latency by 97 %for images using video compression. The source code, examples, and documentation for FogROS2 are available at https://github.com/BerkeleyAutomation/FogROS2, and is available through the official ROS 2 repository at https://index.ros.org/p/fogros2/ 

As many robot automation applications increasingly rely on multi-core processing or deep-learning models, cloud computing is becoming an attractive and economically viable resource for systems that do not contain high computing power onboard. Despite its immense computing capacity, it is often underused by the robotics and automation community due to lack of expertise in cloud computing and cloud-based infrastructure. Fog Robotics balances computing and data between cloud edge devices. We propose a software framework, FogROS, as an extension of the Robot Operating System (ROS), the de-facto standard for creating robot automation applications and components. It allows researchers to deploy components of their software to the cloud with minimal effort, and correspondingly gain access to additional computing cores, GPUs, FPGAs, and TPUs, as well as predeployed software made available by other researchers. FogROS allows a researcher to specify which components of their software will be deployed to the cloud and to what type of computing hardware. We evaluate FogROS on 3 examples: (1) simultaneous localization and mapping (ORB-SLAM2), (2) Dexterity Network (Dex-Net) GPU-based grasp planning, and (3) multi-core motion planning using a 96-core cloud-based server. In all three examples, a component is deployed to the cloud and accelerated with a small change in system launch configuration, while incurring additional latency of 1.2 s, 0.6 s, and 0.5 s due to network communication, the computation speed is improved by 2.6x, 6.0x and 34.2x, respectively. 

Mechanical search, the finding and extracting of a known target object from a cluttered environment, is a key challenge in automating warehouse, home, retail, and industrial tasks. In this paper, we consider contexts in which occluding objects are to remain untouched, thus minimizing disruptions and avoiding toppling. We assume a 6-DOF robot with an RGBD camera and unicontact suction gripper mounted on its wrist. With this setup, the robot can move both camera and gripper in order to identify a suitable approach vector, reach in to achieve a suction grasp of the target object, and extract it. We present AVPLUG: Approach Vector PLanning for Unicontact Grasping, an algorithm that uses an octree occupancy model and Minkowski sum computation to find a collision-free grasp approach vector. Experiments in simulation and with a physical Fetch robot suggest that AVPLUG finds an approach vector up to 20× faster than a baseline search policy. 

Consumer demand for augmented reality (AR) in mobile phone applications, such as the Apple ARKit. Such applications have potential to expand access to robot grasp planning systems such as Dex-Net. AR apps use structure from motion methods to compute a point cloud from a sequence of RGB images taken by the camera as it is moved around an object. However, the resulting point clouds are often noisy due to estimation errors. We present a distributed pipeline, DexNet AR, that allows point clouds to be uploaded to a server in our lab, cleaned, and evaluated by Dex-Net grasp planner to generate a grasp axis that is returned and displayed as an overlay on the object. We implement Dex-Net AR using the iPhone and ARKit and compare results with those generated with high-performance depth sensors. The success rates with AR on harder adversarial objects are higher than traditional depth images. 

For robots using motion planning algorithms such as RRT and RRT*, the computational load can vary by orders of magnitude as the complexity of the local environment changes. To adaptively provide such computation, we propose Fog Robotics algorithms in which cloud-based serverless lambda computing provides parallel computation on demand. To use this parallelism, we propose novel motion planning algorithms that scale effectively with an increasing number of serverless computers. However, given that the allocation of computing is typically bounded by both monetary and time constraints, we show how prior learning can be used to efficiently allocate resources at runtime. We demonstrate the algorithms and application of learned parallel allocation in both simulation and with the Fetch commercial mobile manipulator using Amazon Lambda to complete a sequence of sporadically computationally intensive motion planning tasks. 

Robots for picking in e-commerce warehouses require rapid computing of efficient and smooth robot arm motions between varying configurations. Recent results integrate grasp analysis with arm motion planning to compute optimal smooth arm motions; however, computation times on the order of tens of seconds dominate motion times. Recent advances in deep learning allow neural networks to quickly compute these motions; however, they lack the precision required to produce kinematically and dynamically feasible motions. While infeasible, the network-computed motions approximate the optimized results. The proposed method warm starts the optimization process by using the approximate motions as a starting point from which the optimizing motion planner refines to an optimized and feasible motion with few iterations. In experiments, the proposed deep learning–based warm-started optimizing motion planner reduces compute and motion time when compared to a sampling-based asymptotically optimal motion planner and an optimizing motion planner. When applied to grasp-optimized motion planning, the results suggest that deep learning can reduce the computation time by two orders of magnitude (300×), from 29 s to 80 ms, making it practical for e-commerce warehouse picking.