Robot Cloud: Bridging the power of robotics and cloud computing

Abstract Cloud computing is shaping the cyber world and evolves as a key computing and service platform for sharing resources including platforms, software applications and everything in the form of services. This is known “X as a Service”. Although it brings our age unparalleled computing ability and economic benefits, the application of cloud computing is still limited currently in the cyberspace due to the cloud services can only reside in cloud instead of our daily life environment. In fact, there are still a plethora of physical position based on-site service demands that cloud computing could help little due to the “cyber limitation”. In this paper, we aim to integrate the cyber world and the physical world by bringing up the idea of “Robot Cloud” to bridge the power of robotics and cloud computing. To make it possible, we design a novel Robot Cloud stack to support our idea and adopt the service-oriented architecture (SOA) to make the functional modules in the Robot Cloud more flexible, extensible and reusable. Then we develop a prototype of Robot Cloud using the popular Google App Engine to demonstrate our design method. Finally, we conduct the simulation experiments with a “robot show” application scenario to evaluate our scheduling policy and identify the effect of different request distributions and robot center solutions.