Optimal Communications for Collaborative Sensing Toward Closed-Loop Control of Robots

Robots can perform hazardous tasks in hard-to-access or dangerous scenarios. Both sensors and an edge information hub (EIH) are essential for navigating the robot. The sensors collaboratively collect the state of controlled objects, while the EIH processes the sensor data and generates control commands. Typically, these sensors, the EIH, and the robot operate synergetically in a sensing-communication-computing-control (SC3) closed-loop manner, which is sensitive to latency. Thus, we minimize the latency of data uploading from collaborative sensors to the EIH. The water-sampling model is proposed to depict the redundancy of sensor data. We accordingly derive a closed-form optimal solution for the multiple-access bandwidth allocation problem. Simulation results validate the superiority of the proposed task-oriented scheme over conventional communication approaches.