When Robots Exchange Meaning: A Demo of Goal-Oriented Semantic Communications for Collaborative Robotics

Abstract:Collaborative robotics is a representative task-oriented 6G use-case, where communication quality should be reflected in mission execution, environment understanding, and closed-loop operation rather than packet delivery alone. This demo paper presents a robot-edge semantic communication (SemCom) testbed integrating robot-side visual compression, edge-side semantic mapping, and dashboard-based mission interaction. A mobile robot equipped with RGB-D sensing and LiDAR runs ROS 2, while a Jetson Orin edge node performs reconstruction, RTAB-Map mapping, semantic object handling, and browserbased visualization. As an initial proof of concept, RGB frames are encoded on the robot into VQ-VAE tokens using an ONNX Runtime encoder and reconstructed on the edge using a PyTorch decoder. A 320 X 240 image is represented by an 80 X 60 token grid with a packed payload of 5400 bytes, corresponding to a 42.67X reduction relative to model-input RGB bytes. The reconstructed visual stream is further associated with depth, pose, and 3D mapping information to generate a semantic map for downstream robotic applications. The demo exposes the full path from semantic visual transport to object-level map interaction, and provides a practical platform for future task-aware 6G networking studies at the intersection of SemCom, embodied AI, and physical AI-enabled robotics. A video of the demo is available at this https URL

3 pages, 3 figures. This paper has been accepted for presentation as a demo paper at IEEE CSCN 2026

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2607.28256 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2607.28256v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.28256 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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