New Problems in Distributed Inference for DNN Models on Robotic IoT

The rapid advancements in machine learning (ML) techniques have led to significant achievements in various robotic tasks. Deploying these ML approaches on real-world robots requires fast and energy-efficient inference of their deep neural network (DNN) models. To our knowledge, distributed inference, which involves inference across multiple powerful GPU devices, has emerged as a promising optimization to improve inference performance in modern data centers. However, when deployed on real-world robots, existing parallel methods can not simultaneously meet the robots' latency and energy requirements and raise significant challenges.