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Decentralized Sharing and Valuation of Fleet Robotic Data
Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Robot Learning, PMLR 164:1795-1800, 2022.
Abstract
We propose a decentralized learning framework for robots to trade, price, and discover valuable machine learning (ML) training data. Today’s robotic fleets, such as self-driving vehicles, can gather terabytes of rich video and LIDAR data in diverse, geo-distributed environments. Often, robots in one city or home might observe training data that is commonplace for them, but is actually a valuable, out-of-distribution (OoD) dataset to train robust ML models at robots elsewhere. However, simply sharing all this diverse data in cloud databases is infeasible due to limits on privacy and network bandwidth. Inspired by decentralized file sharing protocols like BitTorrent, we propose a novel system where each robot is provisioned with a learnable privacy filter and sharing model. Importantly, this sharing model attempts to predict and prioritize which sensory percepts are of high value to other robotic peers using a decentralized voting and feedback mechanism. Our scheme naturally raises timely questions on data privacy and valuation as companies start to deploy robots in our homes, hospitals, and roads.