Cloud robotics

Cloud robotics is a field of robotics that attempts to invoke cloud technologies such as cloud computing, cloud storage, and other Internet technologies centred on the benefits of converged infrastructure and shared services for robotics. When connected to the cloud, robots can benefit from the powerful computational, storage, and communications resources of modern data centre in the cloud, which can process and share information from various robots or agent (other machines, smart objects, humans, etc.). Humans can also delegate tasks to robots remotely through networks. Cloud computing technologies enable robot systems to be endowed with powerful capability whilst reducing costs through cloud technologies. Thus, it is possible to build lightweight, low cost, smarter robots have intelligent "brain" in the cloud. The "brain" consists of data center, knowledge base, task planners, deep learning, information processing, environment models, communication support etc.[1][2][3][4]

Components

A cloud for robots potentially has at least six significant components:[5]

Applications

Autonomous mobile robots: Google's self-driving cars are cloud robots. The cars use the network to access Google's enormous database of maps and satellite and environment model (like Streetview) and combines it with streaming data from GPS, cameras, and 3D sensors to monitor its own position within centimetres, and with past and current traffic patterns to avoid collisions. Each car can learn something about environments, roads, or driving, or conditions, and it sends the information to the Google cloud, where it can be used to improve the performance of other cars.

Cloud medical robots: a medical cloud (also called a healthcare cluster) consists of various services such as a disease archive, electronic medical records, a patient health management system, practice services, analytics services, clinic solutions, expert systems, etc. A robot can connect to the cloud to provide clinical service to patients, as well as deliver assistance to doctors (e.g. a co-surgery robot). Moreover, it also provides a collaboration service by sharing information between doctors and care givers about clinical treatment.[6] Assistive robots: A domestic robot can be employed for healthcare and life monitoring for elderly people. The system collects the health status of users and exchange information with cloud expert system or doctors to facilitate elderly peoples life, especially for those with chronic diseases. For example, the robots are able to provide support to prevent the elderly from falling down, emergency healthy support such as heart disease, blooding disease. Care givers of elderly people can also get notification when in emergency from the robot through network.[7]

Industrial robots: As highlighted by the Germany Industry 4.0 Plan "Industry is on the threshold of the fourth industrial revolution. Driven by the Internet, the real and virtual worlds are growing closer and closer together to form the Internet of Things. Industrial production of the future will be characterised by the strong individualisation of products under the conditions of highly flexible (large series) production, the extensive integration of customers and business partners in business and value-added processes, and the linking of production and high-quality services leading to so-called hybrid products." [8] In manufacturing, such cloud based robot systems could learn to handle tasks such as threading wires or cables, or aligning gaskets from professional knowledge base. A group of robots can share information for some collaborative tasks. Even more, a consumer is able to order customised product to manufacturing robots directly with online order system.[9] Another potential paradigm is shopping-delivery robot system- once an order is placed, a warehouse robot dispatches the item to an autonomous car or autonomous drone to delivery it to its recipient (see Figure Cloud Self-driving Car ).

Research

RoboEarth [10] was funded by the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development projects, specifically to explore the field of cloud robotics. The goal of RoboEarth is to allow robotic systems to benefit from the experience of other robots, paving the way for rapid advances in machine cognition and behaviour, and ultimately, for more subtle and sophisticated human-machine interaction. RoboEarth offers a Cloud Robotics infrastructure. RoboEarth’s World-Wide-Web style database stores knowledge generated by humans – and robots – in a machine-readable format. Data stored in the RoboEarth knowledge base include software components, maps for navigation (e.g., object locations, world models), task knowledge (e.g., action recipes, manipulation strategies), and object recognition models (e.g., images, object models). The RoboEarth Cloud Engine includes support for mobile robots, autonomous vehicles, and drones, which require lots of computation for navigation.[11]

Rapyuta [12] is an open source cloud robotics framework based on RoboEarth Engine developed by the robotics researcher at ETHZ. Within the framework, each robot connected to Rapyuta can have a secured computing environment (rectangular boxes) giving them the ability to move their heavy computation into the cloud. In addition, the computing environments are tightly interconnected with each other and have a high bandwidth connection to the RoboEarth knowledge repository.[13]

KnowRob [14] is an extensional project of RoboEarth. It is a knowledge processing system that combines knowledge representation and reasoning methods with techniques for acquiring knowledge and for grounding the knowledge in a physical system and can serve as a common semantic framework for integrating information from different sources.

RoboBrain [15] is a large-scale computational system that learns from publicly available Internet resources, computer simulations, and real-life robot trials. It accumulates everything robotics into a comprehensive and interconnected knowledge base. Applications include prototyping for robotics research, household robots, and self-driving cars. The goal is as direct as the project's name—to create a centralised, always-online brain for robots to tap into. The project is dominated by Stanford University and Cornel University. And the project is supported by the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, the Army Research Office, Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the National Robotics Initiative, whose goal is to advance robotics to help make the United States more competitive in the world economy.[16]

MyRobots is a service for connecting robots and intelligent devices to the Internet.[17] It can be regarded as a social network for robots and smart objects (i.e. Facebook for robots). With socialising, collaborating and sharing, robots can benefit from those interactions too by sharing their sensor information giving insight on their perspective of their current state.

COALAS [18] is funded by the INTERREG IVA France (Channel) – England European cross-border co-operation programme. The project aims to develop new technologies for handicapped people through social and technological innovation and through the users' social and psychological integrity. Objectives is to produce a cognitive ambient assistive living system with Healthcare cluster in cloud with domestic service robots like humanoid, intelligent wheelchair which connect with the cloud.[7]

ROS(Robot Operating System) provides an eco-system to support cloud robotics. ROS is a flexible and distributed framework for robot software development. It is a collection of tools, libraries, and conventions that aim to simplify the task of creating complex and robust robot behaviour across a wide variety of robotic platforms. A library for ROS that is a pure Java implementation, called rosjava, allows Android applications to be developed for robots. Since Android has a booming market and billion users, it would be significant in the field of Cloud Robotics.[19]

Limitations of cloud robotics

Though robots can benefit from various advantages of cloud computing, cloud is not the solution to all of robotics.[20]

Challenges

The research and development of cloud robotics has following potential issues and challenges:[20]

Risks

Environmental security - The concentration of computing resources and users in a cloud computing environment also represents a concentration of security threats. Because of their size and significance, cloud environments are often targeted by virtual machines and bot malware, brute force attacks, and other attacks.

Data privacy and security - Hosting confidential data with cloud service providers involves the transfer of a considerable amount of an organisation's control over data security to the provider. For example, every cloud contains a huge information from the clients include personal data. If a household robot is hacked, users could have risk of their personal privacy and security, like house layout, life snapshot, home-view, etc. It may be accessed and leaked to the world around by criminals. Another problems is once a robot is hacked and controlled by someone else, which may put the user in danger.

Ethical problems - Some ethics of robotics, especially for cloud based robotics must be considered. Since a robot is connected via networks, it has risk to be accessed by other people. If a robot is out of control and carries out illegal activities, who should be responsible for it.

History

Special Issue on Cloud Robotics and Automation- A special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, April 2015.[1]

2013 IEEE IROS Workshop on Cloud Robotics. Tokyo. November 2013.[21]

NRI Workshop on Cloud Robotics: Challenges and Opportunities- February 2013.[22]

Robot APP Store Robot Applications in Cloud, provide applications for robot just like computer/phone app.[23]

DARPA Cloud Robotics.[24]

A Roadmap for U.S. Robotics From Internet to Robotics 2013 Edition- by Georgia Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Technology Consortium, University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California, Stanford University, University of California–Berkeley, University of Washington, Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyUS and Robotics OA US. The Roadmap highlighted “Cloud” Robotics and Automation for Manufacturing in the future years.[20]

Cloud-Based Robot Grasping with the Google Object Recognition Engine.[25]

National Robotics Initiative of US announced in 2011 aimed to explore how robots can enhance the work of humans rather than replacing them. It claims that next generation of robots are more aware than oblivious, more social than solitary.[26]

James J. Kuffner, a former CMU robotics professor, and now research scientist at Google, spoke on cloud robotics in IEEE/RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robotics 2010. It describes "a new approach to robotics that takes advantage of the Internet as a resource for massively parallel computation and sharing of vast data resources."[27]

Ryan Hickman, a Google Product Manager, led an internal volunteer effort in 2010 to connect robots with the Google's cloud services.This work was later expanded to include open source ROS support and was demonstrated on stage by Ryan Hickman, Damon Kohler, Brian Gerkey, and Ken Conley at Google I/O 2011.[28]

Cloud Robotics-Enable cloud computing for robots. The author proposed some paradigms of using cloud computing in robotics. Some potential field and challenges were coined. R. Li 2009.[4]

The IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Internet and Online Robots was founded by Ken Goldberg and Roland Siegwart et al. in May 2001. The committee then expanded to IEEE Society of Robotics and Automation's Technical Committee on Networked Robots in 2004.[29]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 "Cloud Robotics and Automation A special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering.". IEEE. Retrieved 7 December 2014.
  2. ↑ "RoboEarth".
  3. ↑ Goldberg, Ken. "Cloud Robotics and Automation".
  4. 1 2 Li, R. "Cloud Robotics-Enable cloud computing for robots". Retrieved 7 December 2014.
  5. ↑ Kehoe, Ben; Patil, Sachin; Abbeel, Pieter; Goldburg, Ken (13 September 2014). "A Survey of Research on Cloud Robotics and Automation" (PDF). IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AUTOMATION SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING.
  6. ↑ "Impact of Cloud Computing on Healthcare" (PDF).
  7. 1 2 Li, Ruijiao; Hu, Huosheng (16 October 2013). "Towards ROS Based Multi-robot Architecture for Ambient Assisted Living". Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC), 2013 IEEE International Conference on: 3458–3463. doi:10.1109/SMC.2013.590.
  8. ↑ "Project of the Future: Industry 4.0". Retrieved 9 December 2014.
  9. ↑ LaSelle, Rush. "Automation in the Cloud". Robotic Industries Association. Retrieved 9 December 2014.
  10. ↑ "roboearth". Retrieved 7 December 2014.
  11. ↑ Waibel, M; Tenorth, M; D'Andrea, R. "RoboEarth". IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine 18 (2): 69–82. doi:10.1109/MRA.2011.941632.
  12. ↑ "Rapyuta". Retrieved 7 December 2014.
  13. ↑ Hunziker, D; D'Andrea, R; Gajamohan, M; Waibel, M (May 2013). "Rapyuta: The RoboEarth Cloud Engine". Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2013 IEEE International Conference on: 438–444. doi:10.1109/ICRA.2013.6630612.
  14. ↑ "KnowRob". Retrieved 8 December 2014.
  15. ↑ "RoboBrain Project". Retrieved 7 December 2014.
  16. ↑ "Robo Brain' mines the Internet to teach robots".
  17. ↑ "MyRobots". Retrieved 9 December 2014.
  18. ↑ Hu, Huosheng; McDonald-Maier, Klaus D; Gu, Dongbing; Li, Ruijiao. "COLAS". Retrieved 7 December 2014.
  19. ↑ "ROSjava-Cloud Robotics". Retrieved 9 December 2014.
  20. 1 2 3 Robotics-vo. "A Roadmap for U.S. Robotics From Internet to Robotics 2013 Edition" (PDF). Retrieved 8 December 2014.
  21. ↑ "2013 IEEE IROS Workshop on Cloud Robotics. Tokyo. November 2013".
  22. ↑ "http://cloud-robotics.cs.umn.edu/". Retrieved 7 December 2014. External link in |title= (help)
  23. ↑ "RobotApp". Retrieved 7 December 2014.
  24. ↑ "DARPA-Cloud-Robotics". Retrieved 7 December 2014.
  25. ↑ Goldberg, Ken. "Cloud-based robot grasping with the google object recognition engine". Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2013 IEEE International Conference on. doi:10.1109/ICRA.2013.6631180.
  26. ↑ "Big NSF grant funds research into training robots to work with humans".
  27. ↑ Kuffner, James. "Cloud Enabled Humanoid Robots" (PDF). IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robotics.
  28. ↑ "Google I/O 2011: Cloud Robotics, ROS for Java and Android". Retrieved 9 December 2014.
  29. ↑ "Networked Robots Committee". Retrieved 8 December 2014.

External links

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