Fed-EC: Bandwidth-Efficient Clustering-Based Federated Learning for Autonomous Visual Robot Navigation

Centralized learning requires data to be aggregated at a central server, which poses significant challenges in terms of data privacy and bandwidth consumption. Federated learning presents a compelling alternative, however, vanilla federated learning methods deployed in robotics aim to learn a single...

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Published in:	IEEE robotics and automation letters Vol. 9; no. 12; pp. 11841 - 11848
Main Authors:	Gummadi, Shreya, Gasparino, Mateus V., Vasisht, Deepak, Chowdhary, Girish
Format:	Journal Article
Language:	English
Published:	IEEE 01.12.2024
Subjects:	Bandwidth Computational modeling Computer vision Data models Decentralized control Distributed robot systems Federated learning Navigation Predictive models Robot vision systems robotics in under-resourced settings Servers Training vision-based navigation
ISSN:	2377-3766, 2377-3766
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Abstract	Centralized learning requires data to be aggregated at a central server, which poses significant challenges in terms of data privacy and bandwidth consumption. Federated learning presents a compelling alternative, however, vanilla federated learning methods deployed in robotics aim to learn a single global model across robots that works ideally for all. But in practice one model may not be well suited for robots deployed in various environments. This letter proposes Federated-EmbedCluster (Fed-EC), a clustering-based federated learning framework that is deployed with vision based autonomous robot navigation in diverse outdoor environments. The framework addresses the key federated learning challenge of deteriorating model performance of a single global model due to the presence of non-IID data across real-world robots. Extensive real-world experiments validate that Fed-EC reduces the communication size by 23x for each robot while matching the performance of centralized learning for goal-oriented navigation and outperforms local learning. Fed-EC can transfer previously learnt models to new robots that join the cluster.
AbstractList	Centralized learning requires data to be aggregated at a central server, which poses significant challenges in terms of data privacy and bandwidth consumption. Federated learning presents a compelling alternative, however, vanilla federated learning methods deployed in robotics aim to learn a single global model across robots that works ideally for all. But in practice one model may not be well suited for robots deployed in various environments. This letter proposes Federated-EmbedCluster (Fed-EC), a clustering-based federated learning framework that is deployed with vision based autonomous robot navigation in diverse outdoor environments. The framework addresses the key federated learning challenge of deteriorating model performance of a single global model due to the presence of non-IID data across real-world robots. Extensive real-world experiments validate that Fed-EC reduces the communication size by 23x for each robot while matching the performance of centralized learning for goal-oriented navigation and outperforms local learning. Fed-EC can transfer previously learnt models to new robots that join the cluster.
Author	Chowdhary, Girish Gasparino, Mateus V. Gummadi, Shreya Vasisht, Deepak
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SubjectTerms	Bandwidth Computational modeling Computer vision Data models Decentralized control Distributed robot systems Federated learning Navigation Predictive models Robot vision systems robotics in under-resourced settings Servers Training vision-based navigation
Title	Fed-EC: Bandwidth-Efficient Clustering-Based Federated Learning for Autonomous Visual Robot Navigation
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