Design of a cloud robotics middleware based on web service technology

In the process of robotics applications development, Robot Operating System (ROS) has been a defactostandard tool. However, ROS nodes always run at the on-board computer. Limited resources of CPU and storage restrict the ability of robotics when performing a task. A good solution is to transfer the computing-intensive tasks to the Cloud. In view of this, we deploy ROS packages in Cloud virtual machines and encapsulate them as web services. Meanwhile, we design a middleware based on web service technology. As the core of the whole Cloud Robotics system, the middleware is responsible for parsing the Cloud Robotics task request and schedule ROS nodes in a distributed network. Experiments have been performed to validate the reliability of the middleware.