Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems 13(1), 26-33, 2015

CLOUD ROBOTICS PLATFORMS

Busra Koken*

Yalova University
Yalova, Turkey
DOI: 10.7906/indecs.13.1.4 Received: 12 October 2014.
Regular article Accepted: 17 January 2015.

ABSTRACT
Cloud robotics is a rapidly evolving field that allows robots to offload computation-intensive and
storage-intensive jobs into the cloud. Robots are limited in terms of computational capacity, memory
and storage. Cloud provides unlimited computation power, memory, storage and especially
collaboration opportunity. Cloud-enabled robots are divided into two categories as standalone and
networked robots. This article surveys cloud robotic platforms, standalone and networked robotic
works such as grasping, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) and monitoring.

KEY WORDS
cloud, cloud robotics, cloud computing, cloud platform, networked robots

CLASSIFICATION
ACM: D.1.1.
JEL: O39

*Corresponding author, : busrakoken@gmail.com; +90 536 740 1717;

*
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 Cloud robotics platforms

INTRODUCTION
Cloud Robotics (CR) is a term combination of cloud technologies and robotics. Robots
empowered with cloud technologies have been an important part of our daily lives. NIST [1]
defines cloud computing as “a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand
network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers,
storage, applications and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal
management effort or service provider interaction.”
Cloud computing consist of three fundamental models as Software as a Service (SaaS),
Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) as shown in Figure 1.
SaaS applications are served over the internet, thus eliminating the need to install and run the
application on the users system [2]. They are managed from a centralized location and
accessed remotely by a web browser or a mobile client. Google Apps is the most widely used
SaaS application suit.
PaaS refers to a computing platform served by cloud infrastructure. PaaS offers developers to
get a hold of all the systems and environments required for the life cycle of software, be it
developing, testing, deploying and hosting of web applications. Some examples are Amazon
Web Services (AWS) [3] and Microsoft’s Azure [4].
IaaS provides the required infrastructure as a service. The client need not purchase the
required servers, data center or the network resources. The essence of IaaS model is a pay-as-
you-go financial model. Amazon and Microsoft are also IaaS providers.

Figure 1. Cloud computing infrastructure.

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Robots make significant socioeconomic impacts to human lives [5, 6]. For example, robots
can do repetitive or dangerous tasks, such as assembly, painting, packaging, and welding.
However, robots are limited in terms of computational capacity, memory and storage. Also
they have physical constraints such as size, shape, power supply, motion mode and working
environment [7-9]. Robots are usually used for industrial purposes, they are not commonly used
in daily life because of their cost. Cloud computing can be used to enhance robots’ capabilities.
Cloud computing technologies provide numerous advantages that can be valuable for the
composition and running robot services. For example, complex computations of computation
intensive applications can be offloaded in the cloud like what is done for Apple’s voice
recognition service “Siri”. Connecting the robots to semantic knowledge databases hosted in
the cloud will allow a large number of heterogeneous robots to share common sense
knowledge [10-12].
The concept of “robot-as-a-service” (RaaS) refers to robots that can be dynamically combined
to give support to the execution of specific applications. RaaS has three aspects of the system:
structure, interface, and behavior. There can be many kinds of robot cloud units or intelligent
devices. For example, robot cops [13], restaurant robot waiters [14], robot pets [15], and
patient care robots [16]. These robots are distributed in different locations and can be accessed
through CR platforms.
The article is organized as follows:
 section 1, introduction,
 in Section 2, cloud robotics platforms are illustrated,
 cloud-enabled robots are given in Section 3, and
 conclusions are given in Section 4.

CLOUD ROBOTICS PLATFORMS

Developing software solutions for robots is difficult, because of varying hardware and non-
standardized APIs. Robotics researchers, have created a variety of frameworks to manage
complexity and facilitate rapid prototyping of software for experiments, resulting in the many
robotic software systems currently used in academia and industry [17].
Stanford University and Willow Garage developed a generalized open source operating
system called Robot Operating System (ROS) for robots [18]. ROS is not only an operating
system; rather, it provides a structured communications layer above the host operating
systems of a heterogeneous compute cluster [19].
Rapyuta is an open-source cloud robotics platform. It serves a platform-as-a-service (PaaS)
framework for robots. Rapyuta architecture depends on LxC [20] containers. It provides an
environment to access RoboEarth [21] Knowledge Repository. Massively parallel
computation, allowing humans to monitor or intervene robots and serving as a global
repository to store and share object models, environment maps, and actions recipes between
various robotic platforms are some of specifications of Rapyuta. It is a competitor of
Rosbridge [22] in terms of communication [23].
Survivable Cloud Multi-Robotics (SCMR) Framework is designed, implemented and
evaluated for heterogeneous environments. One of the challenges for cloud robotics is the
inherent problem of cloud disconnection. The SCMR framework provides the combination of
a virtual Ad-hoc network formed by robot-to-robot communication and a physical cloud
infrastructure formed by robot-to cloud communications. The design trade-off for SCMR is
between the computation energy for the robot execution and the offloading energy for the
cloud execution. The SCMR framework uses Web Sockets protocol for communication

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between the individual robots and the cloud server. In case of cloud disconnection a virtual ad
hoc cloud is created between the individual robots and the robot leader and the individual
robots communicate with one another through the gossip protocol [24].
Distributed Agents with Collective Intelligence (DAvinCi) is a software framework that
provides the scalability and parallelism advantages of cloud computing for service robots in
large environments. It is implemented as a system around the Hadoop cluster with ROS as the
messaging framework [25].

CLOUD-ENABLED ROBOTS
Robots have some constraints in terms of computational capacity, memory and storage. CR
help them to overcome these challenges. Opportunity to use cloud allows cost effective
robots to be produced. Robots can be classified as traditional robots and cloud-enabled
robots. This paper focuses on cloud-enabled robots. Cloud technologies not only empower
robots but also it allows them to network each other regardless of distance. Cloud-enabled
robots are divided into two categories as standalone robots and networked robots.
Classification of robots is shown in Figure 2.
Robots can do a wide variety of works such as grasping, identifying objects, SLAM,
monitoring, networking and some other actuating works. Robots can grasp formerly known
objects easily. They can also grasp novel objects with the help of cloud. In [26], a study about
grasp planning in the presence of shape uncertainty and how cloud computing can facilitate
parallel Monte Carlo sampling is presented. Kehoe et al focus on parallel-jaw push grasping for
the class of parts that can be modelled as extruded 2-D polygons with statistical tolerances.
Standalone robots can benefit from cloud in terms of computation power, storage capacity
and memory. However, networked robots can make networks, share their information
through cloud and can perform collaborative works. CR infrastructure with standalone robots
and networked robots is presented in Figure 3.
SLAM [27] refers to a technique for a robot or an autonomous vehicle to build a map of the
environment without a priori knowledge, and to simultaneously localize itself in the unknown
environment. SLAM is important in robotics and there are plenty of researches. It consists of
statistical techniques such as Kalman filters, mapping and sensing. Riazuelo et al develop a

Figure 2. Classification of Robots.

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Figure 3. Standalone and Networked Robots.

cloud framework which name is Cloud framework for Cooperative Tracking and Mapping
(C2TAM) [28]. This is a visual SLAM system based a distributed framework where the
CPU-intensive map optimization and storage is allocated as a service in the Cloud, while a
light camera runs on robots for tracking. The robots need only internet connection for
tracking and cooperative relocating. C2TAM provides a database consisting maps can be
built and stored, stored maps can be reused by other robots. A robot can fuse its map online
with a map already in the database, and several robots can estimate individual maps and fuse
them together if an overlap is detected.
Virtual monitoring technology has been applied in more and more fields such as military,
education, medical science, manufacturing engineering, and so forth. In order to realize
resource sharing among all collaborating robots in a virtual monitoring system, cloud
computing is proposed by combining professional computing equipment as a super virtual
computing centre. Zhang et al. proposed 3D virtual monitoring system based on CR. This
system’s architecture consists of communication language for agent communication,
algorithm for cooperative working and conflict resolution. Prototype system is applied for the
monitoring of fully mechanized coal-mining equipment [29].
Networking robots overcome the limitations of stand-alone robots by having robots,
environment sensors, and humans communicate and cooperate through a network. Mateo et
al, presented a work to decrease message overhead occurred because of communication. The
proposed an information sharing model for group communication based on Brownian agent
approach. In presented work they grouped robots in clusters with a cluster head to overcome
message overhead [30]. Kamei et al, proposed prototype infrastructure of cloud networked
robotics enables multi-location robotic services for life support [31-34]. Their study focuses
on requirements in typical daily supporting services through example scenarios that target
senior citizens and the disabled.

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CONCLUSIONS
This article presents cloud computing, cloud robotics and cloud interaction of robots. It
surveys cloud platforms and cloud-enabled robotics studies. Standalone robots can benefit
cloud technologies and networked robots can perform collaborative works. Networked cloud-
enabled robots can share computation resources, information and data with each other and
can access new knowledge and skills not learned by themselves. This is a new paradigm in
robotics that we believe leads to exciting future developments. Future works can focus on
reliable connection, data offloading methods and ubiquitous networking among robots and
cloud services.

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ROBOTSKE PLATFORME U METODI OBLAKA

B. Koken
Sveučilište Yalova
Yalova, Turska

SAŽETAK
Robotika u metodi oblaka područje je ubrzanog razvoja koje omogućava da roboti proslijede procesorki i
memorijski zahtjevne poslove u računalni oblak. Roboti su ograničeni u procesorskom kapacitetu, radnoj
memoriji i mogućnostima pohrane podataka. Oblak omogućava praktički neograničenu procesorsku snagu,
memoriju, mogućnost pohrane i posebno mogućnosti kolaboracije. Roboti u oblaku dijele se u dvije kategorije
kao samostalni i umreženi roboti. Ovaj rad opisuje robotske platforme u metodi oblaka, samostalne i umrežene
robotske procese poput prihvata,istovremene lokalizacije i mapiranja te promatranja
KLJUČNE RIJEČI
oblak, robotika u metodi oblaka, računanje u oblaku, platforma oblaka, umreženi roboti

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