Edge Collaborative Gaussian Splatting with Integrated Rendering and Communication

Gaussian splatting (GS) struggles with degraded rendering quality on low-cost devices. To address this issue, we present edge collaborative GS (ECO-GS), where each user can switch between a local small GS model to guarantee timeliness and a remote large GS model to guarantee fidelity. However, deciding how to engage the large GS model is nontrivial, due to the interdependency between rendering requirements and resource conditions. To this end, we propose integrated rendering and communication (IRAC), which jointly optimizes collaboration status (i.e., deciding whether to engage large GS) and edge power allocation (i.e., enabling remote rendering) under communication constraints across different users by minimizing a newly-derived GS switching function. Despite the nonconvexity of the problem, we propose an efficient penalty majorization minimization (PMM) algorithm to obtain the critical point solution. Furthermore, we develop an imitation learning optimization (ILO) algorithm, which reduces the computational time by over 100x compared to PMM. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of PMM and the real-time execution capability of ILO.

Communication Efficient Robotic Mixed Reality with Gaussian Splatting Cross-Layer Optimization

Realizing low-cost communication in robotic mixed reality (RoboMR) systems presents a challenge, due to the necessity of uploading high-resolution images through wireless channels. This paper proposes Gaussian splatting (GS) RoboMR (GSMR), which enables the simulator to opportunistically render a photo-realistic view from the robot's pose by calling ``memory'' from a GS model, thus reducing the need for excessive image uploads. However, the GS model may involve discrepancies compared to the actual environments. To this end, a GS cross-layer optimization (GSCLO) framework is further proposed, which jointly optimizes content switching (i.e., deciding whether to upload image or not) and power allocation (i.e., adjusting to content profiles) across different frames by minimizing a newly derived GSMR loss function. The GSCLO problem is addressed by an accelerated penalty optimization (APO) algorithm that reduces computational complexity by over $10$x compared to traditional branch-and-bound and search algorithms. Moreover, variants of GSCLO are presented to achieve robust, low-power, and multi-robot GSMR. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed GSMR paradigm and GSCLO method achieve significant improvements over existing benchmarks on both wheeled and legged robots in terms of diverse metrics in various scenarios. For the first time, it is found that RoboMR can be achieved with ultra-low communication costs, and mixture of data is useful for enhancing GS performance in dynamic scenarios.

Green Robotic Mixed Reality with Gaussian Splatting

Realizing green communication in robotic mixed reality (RoboMR) systems presents a challenge, due to the necessity of uploading high-resolution images at high frequencies through wireless channels. This paper proposes Gaussian splatting (GS) RoboMR (GSRMR), which achieves a lower energy consumption and makes a concrete step towards green RoboMR. The crux to GSRMR is to build a GS model which enables the simulator to opportunistically render a photo-realistic view from the robot's pose, thereby reducing the need for excessive image uploads. Since the GS model may involve discrepancies compared to the actual environments, a GS cross-layer optimization (GSCLO) framework is further proposed, which jointly optimizes content switching (i.e., deciding whether to upload image or not) and power allocation across different frames. The GSCLO problem is solved by an accelerated penalty optimization (APO) algorithm. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed GSRMR reduces the communication energy by over 10x compared with RoboMR. Furthermore, the proposed GSRMR with APO outperforms extensive baseline schemes, in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index measure (SSIM).