Edge Insights for Autonomous Mobile Robots (EI for AMR) Robot Orchestration Get Started Guide

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ID 767164
Date 12/16/2022
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Edge Insights for Autonomous Mobile Robots (EI for AMR) Robot Orchestration

There are multiple pieces in the robot orchestration setup: the control plane, edge nodes, and robots. The control plane and zero or more edge nodes form an Intel® Smart Edge Open edge cluster.

This Get Started Guide refers to the control plane, edge nodes, and robots in the following ways.

  • Control plane: Used to control all edge nodes and robots through Kubernetes*. In a Single-Node deployment, the control plane and edge nodes(s) are installed on the same machine. In a Multi-Node deployment, the control plane and edge nodes(s) are on separate machines.

    • There can only be one control plane.

    • Only the control plane knows about the edge nodes. If a robot wants to offload to an edge node, it asks the control plane, and the control plane routes the request to an edge node.

  • Edge node: One or more edge nodes which EI for AMR uses for resource intensive actions like:

    • Remote inference

    • Collaborative SLAM

    • Other actions that help EI for AMR robots perform their purpose efficiently

    From a Kubernetes* perspective, an edge node is an on-premise, stationary worker node.

    • An edge node may be virtual or a physical machine.

    • An edge node can have multiple pods. The control plane handles scheduling the pods across all edge nodes in the cluster.

  • Pod: A pod encapsulates one or more application and always runs on a node. From a Kubernetes* perspective, a pod is the smallest execution unit.

  • Robot: One or more robots with the EI for AMR Robot Complete Kit or Robot Base Kit installed.

    • From a Kubernetes* perspective, a robot is an on-premise, mobile worker node.

    • Robots are added after the initial configuration using onboarding procedures. Whether the initial deployment is Single-Node or Multi-Node does not affect onboarding procedures.

All devices need to be in the same network. Usually, the control plane and the edge nodes are connected with a LAN connection. The robots are connected to the control plane with a Wi-Fi or 5G connection.

The currently supported versions are:

  • Base OS: Ubuntu* 20.04 LTS

  • ROS 2 with data distribution service: Foxy

  • Intel® Smart Edge Open: 21.12

  • ThingsBoard*: 3.3.4.1-CVE22965

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