Abstract
The collaboration between ground and flying robots can take advantage of the capabilities of each system to enhance the performance of robotic applications, including military, healthcare, disaster management, etc. Unfortunately, this cooperation is restricted by the physical constraint that all computation should be performed on robots. The concept of computation offloading has great potential to improve the performance of both ground and flying robots. Unfortunately, external conditions like the network conditions, the robot’s mobility, and the availability of the processing resources may lead to new challenges. Accordingly, these challenges should be addressed from different perspectives, like security, network communication, response time, and energy consumption. Recently, most computation offloading solutions aim to optimize further the robot’s energy consumption. Several research works are designed 1.) to satisfy the real-time requirements of robotic applications and 2.) to solve the trade-off between the energy consumed by computation and communication. To better understand these concepts, we present a comprehensive overview of the computation offloading process for ground and flying robots. We also devised a taxonomy explaining the factors affecting the offloading decision in a robotic scenario. The taxonomy presents guidelines to recognize the scope of research in offloading decisions that were designed for robots. Then, we discuss the state-of-the-art techniques of computation offloading from an architectural point of view, and we survey works related to offloading decisions for robots.