SRCA - The Scalable Robotic Cloud Agents Architecture

TL;DR

This paper introduces a scalable cloud-based architecture for consumer robots, enabling offloading of computationally intensive tasks to the cloud to enhance functionality and ease development.

Contribution

It proposes a novel cloud robotics architecture that simplifies deployment of complex algorithms on consumer robots by offloading processing to remote cloud infrastructure.

Findings

Enables robots to process large data streams using cloud resources.

Simplifies development by providing off-the-shelf robotic algorithms.

Improves robot functionality without increasing on-board hardware.

Abstract

In an effort to penetrate the market at an affordable cost, consumer robots tend to provide limited processing capabilities, just enough to serve the purpose they have been designed for. However, a robot, in principle, should be able to interact and process the constantly increasing information streams generated from sensors or other devices. This would require the implementation of algorithms and mathematical models for the accurate processing of data volumes and significant computational resources. It is clear that as the data deluge continues to grow exponentially, deploying such algorithms on consumer robots will not be easy. Current work presents a cloud-based architecture that aims to offload computational resources from robots to a remote infrastructure, by utilizing and implementing cloud technologies. This way robots are allowed to enjoy functionality offered by complex algorithms that are executed on the cloud. The proposed system architecture allows developers and engineers not specialised in robotic implementation environments to utilize generic robotic algorithms and services off-the-shelf.