Leveraging the Cloud to develop Service Robotics Applications

Cloud Robotics is a new research field in robotics. It was first introduced in 2010, and it aims at leveraging internet based technologies to open new possibilities in the development of service robotics applications. Thanks to the cloud, robots can offload part of their computation and storage resources remotely, or can share their knowledge and collaborate with other robots to perform tasks. Hence, Cloud Robotics can push the development of robotics applications to a new level of complexity, and it is a perfect technology to solve common issues in service robotics. However, the cloud introduces new open issues in real applications. This Ph.D. dissertation focuses on the design of general frameworks to enable the development of service robotics applications resorting on the cloud robotics paradigm. This work has been carried out at Politecnico di Torino, in collaboration with Telecom Italia S.p.A. We introduce a Cloud Robotics Platform developed by Telecom Italia, that aims at providing a full infrastructure to develop robotics applications. Then, we present two frameworks to support the development of service robotics applications. Finally, we apply those frameworks to develop two cloud robotics applications that have been tested in real contexts, namely, Robot@CED and PARLOMA. The Robot@CED project aims at developing an autonomous monitoring tool for data center environments, able to automatically inspect data centers rooms with an autonomous robotic platform and inform managers if thermal anomalies occur. On the other hand, PARLOMA aims at developing a telecommunication system for deafblind people, able to transmit information encoded in tactile Sing Languages. As demonstrated by the two applications developed in this work, the Cloud is an enabler for service robotics applications: it opens new technological possibilities to developers and, at the same time, allows producer to develop low cost and general porpoise robotic hardware.