Robots as-a-Service in Cloud Computing: Search and Rescue in Large-scale Disasters Case Study

TL;DR

This paper presents a cloud-based IoT infrastructure for virtualizing robots as a service to enhance search and rescue operations during large-scale disasters, supported by a proof of concept and performance evaluation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel IoT IaaS architecture that virtualizes heterogeneous robots and supports federation, enabling scalable disaster response applications.

Findings

The architecture meets key requirements like unified robot description and discovery.

A proof of concept demonstrates feasibility and performance.

Lessons learned guide future research directions.

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to enable a myriad of applications by interconnecting objects - such as sensors and robots - over the Internet. IoT applications range from healthcare to autonomous vehicles and include disaster management. Enabling these applications in cloud environments requires the design of appropriate IoT Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IoT IaaS) to ease the provisioning of the IoT objects as cloud services. This paper discusses a case study on search and rescue IoT applications in large-scale disaster scenarios. It proposes an IoT IaaS architecture that virtualizes robots (IaaS for robots) and provides them to the upstream applications as-a-Service. Node- and Network-level robots virtualization are supported. The proposed architecture meets a set of identified requirements, such as the need for a unified description model for heterogeneous robots, publication/discovery mechanism, and federation with other IaaS for robots when needed. A validating proof of concept is built and experiments are made to evaluate its performance. Lessons learned and prospective research directions are discussed.