A CODECO Case Study and Initial Validation for Edge Orchestration of Autonomous Mobile Robots

Abstract: Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) increasingly adopt containerized micro-services across the Edge-Cloud continuum. While Kubernetes is the de-facto orchestrator for such systems, its assumptions of stable networks, homogeneous resources, and ample compute capacity do not fully hold in mobile, resource-constrained robotic environments. This paper describes a case study on smart-manufacturing AMRs and performs an initial comparison between CODECO orchestration and standard Kubernetes using a controlled KinD environment. Metrics include pod deployment and deletion times, CPU and memory usage, and inter-pod data rates. The observed results indicate that CODECO offers reduced CPU consumption and more stable communication patterns, at the cost of modest memory overhead (10-15%) and slightly increased pod lifecycle latency due to secure overlay initialization.