{"id":8688,"date":"2015-07-28T12:49:28","date_gmt":"2015-07-28T10:49:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.zhaw.ch\/icclab\/?p=8688"},"modified":"2021-03-04T18:51:26","modified_gmt":"2021-03-04T16:51:26","slug":"cloud-robotics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.zhaw.ch\/icclab\/cloud-robotics\/","title":{"rendered":"Cloud Robotics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Overview<\/h1>\n

The connection between the physical world and the virtual world has never been as exciting, accessible, and economically viable as today. Sensors, actors and robots are able to deliver many physical services in several scenarios, including industrial production and home automation, elderly care, assisted living, logistics and cooperative maintenance.<\/p>\n

In isolation, computing capabilities of robots are however limited <\/strong>by embedded CPUs and small on-board storage units. By connecting robots among each other and to cloud computing<\/strong>, cloud storage, and other Internet technologies centered around the benefits of converged infrastructure and shared services, two main advantages can be exploited. First, computation can be outsourced to cloud services leveraging an on-demand pay-per-use elastic model<\/strong>. Second, robots can access a plethora of services complementing their capabilities<\/strong> (e.g., speech analysis, object recognition, knowledge sharing), enabling new complex functionalities and supporting learning.<\/p>\n

Cloud robotics is a natural extension to the Internet of Things (IoT). Where IoT devices will gather information about an environment to help make smarter decisions, cloud robotics will be able to use this information and act on it.<\/p>\n

Although there is clear recognition that Cloud access is required to complement robotics computation and enable functionalities needed for robotic tasks (e.g., self-driving cars), it is still unclear how to best support these scenarios.<\/p>\n

State of the practice<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Robot Operating System (ROS)<\/strong> (http:\/\/www.ros.org\/<\/a>) has gained massive traction both in industry and research.<\/p>\n

ROS allows robotics developers to concentrate on one specific functionality at a time (e.g., planning, navigation, 3d reconstruction) implemented into so-called ROS nodes that can communicate through pub\/sub or RPC-like messages to implement a coherent robotic behavior.<\/p>\n

Its next release iteration (ROS2) will address most of the shortcomings of the previous version, for instance removing the need for a centralized master node and adopting a peer to peer discovery mechanism for nodes.<\/p>\n

Current ROS development is still faced with low-level interoperability and compilation concerns. Containers in this context are used for the moment simply as a way of providing a consistent running environment for ROS code, however none of the best practices from cloud computing (e.g., resource and container management, placement automation, resource and SW orchestration, continuous integration and deployment) have been adopted yet.<\/p>\n

\"rviz<\/a>
Our lab as seen and mapped by one of our turtlebots<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

Objectives<\/h1>\n

The initiative\u2019s goal is to enable robotic applications to take full advantage of cloud computing services, resources, best practices, and automation by integrating ROS nodes and robots just as other composable services in the cloud<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

The results will benefit all robotic stakeholders:<\/p>\n